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1

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: November 29, 2023, 02:34:07 am »

How on earth would chess help you make better decisions elsewhere in life ever?

When you avoid the bishop by only stepping on white tiles.

2

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #205: Permission Requested

« on: November 24, 2023, 03:48:09 am »

I think "If you can buy cards, and there are cards in the supply costing up to the $ you have, you must spend  all your buys"  covers the edge cases.

I mean, technically, this condition would trigger when you play Black Market, which is of course nonsensical. But: Do you have to buy a card from BM?

I alo would phrase is as "spend all your Buys" because that condition extends too far into the future. If you have a conditional check like this, you can just say "you must buy a card", and then see if the condition is still satisfied after the buy.

3

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #205: Permission Requested

« on: November 21, 2023, 08:15:10 am »

Coach
Action-Command. $5
You may gain and play a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $5 twice. Each other player may discard two cards from their hand to gain a copy of it (or a horse) to their hand.

Do you gain two Action cards or do you gain one and play it twice?

4

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #204: Count up!

« on: November 16, 2023, 04:14:01 am »

Super weak, I don’t see how you can actually thin with a card that gets rid of one Estate and one Copper.
Even without that variety restriction the card would be quite weak.

Well, with 3 cards on the Tavern mat it is already stronger than Experiment. But it should probably return itself to the supply so that you can keep on getting new copies.

5

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #204: Count up!

« on: November 09, 2023, 05:35:15 am »

Novel - Trait

After playing a Novel card, if there are 5 or more Novel cards in the supply, +1 Card. Otherwise, discard a card.

The novelty wears off quickly.

6

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: November 08, 2023, 12:09:42 pm »

not sure whether that is a valid take on the PC dimension. It's trained to never choose sides on anything, and also to say that certain things are bad, and both drives contradict each other, but they are also arguably both PC

I don't think "political correctness" is usually used to refer to not choosing sides.

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Halloween Kingdom

« on: October 31, 2023, 06:27:48 pm »

Huh, I was just playing a game online, and suddenly every card was named Chewbacca. Someone, somewhere in the world must have been trying out the Kingdom.

If only I had had a Chewbacca (Mystic) or a Chewbacca (Sorceress) in my hand to play at the time.

I for one would prefer a Chewbacca (First Mate). Which, funnily enough, is very flavorful.

8

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #203: Mixed Box 2

« on: October 30, 2023, 04:50:35 am »

Question about the prompt: If you use a mechanic that appears in multiple but not all expansions like Events or Durations, do you have to pick one of the expansions it appears in for the Mixed Box?

9

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 24, 2023, 03:25:00 am »

But I'm open to change my mind if someone can demonstrate that it doesn't do the things I think it does

The way I see it, this seems hardly possible.

- friendships and romantic interests: This just seems hard to study, given that you can't just use a random sample of the population, you'd have to get all ex-partners of some person or a whole friend group to participate. So I don't expect to find any data on this.
- profession prediction: You have put a qualifier on this so that even if I found evidence that indicated some profession has about the same distribution as the general population, you could always turn around and say "well, that just means this is not one of the profesion that MBTI is a predictor for!"

So in that way, you claims are all but non-falsifiable.

10

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 22, 2023, 11:07:30 am »

So I think I should probably state what I expect MBTI to do:

- I expect MBTI to be predictive of people's romantic interests. But that does not mean that profile A will want to date similar profiles, or that profile A will always date profile B. It means that if you are interested in someone with profile B, then anyone else you're interested in is much more likely to have a profile similar to B. So a correlation among different interests of the same person. I expect this to be stronger than Big5
- Same for friendships
- I expect MBTI to be super predictive of various professions, like becoming a processional chess or starcraft player (or any other esport that doesn't have team play), and probably also for lots of other professions (although not all). I expect some of these to be much stronger than Big5, although certainly not all
- I don't expect it to strongly correlate with income or happiness or longevity or health or IQ or whatever because there's just no obvious reason why it would correlate with these particular things. There are probably weak correlations because weak correlations exist between lots of things, but this isn't what it's primarily measuring.
- Obviously you should use percentages and not categories for all the above

Basically, I expect MBTI to be better at all the interesting stuff like actual personality differences and worse at all or at least most of the boring stuff like future income of job success

Why?

11

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #202: Extra! Read all about it!

« on: October 19, 2023, 08:08:14 am »

How about a one-shot? Enterprise is a Silver that hangs around in your deck until you trash it for an extra-turn. You can get some economy in the opening and then pop it later when the timing is better, or take the extra turn right away. Regardless, you'll have keep getting more if you want the extra turns to keep coming. Unlike Mission and Journey, you can gain Enterprises with Workshops and the like.

Sidenote: props to DXV on the new errata wording, this makes extra turn cards SO much simpler, jeez where has this been all these years.

Well, you pointed out yourself why this is too good via the comparison with the landscapes.
It is far too easy to consistently play this in an engine with a gainer. You just gotta play two stop cards each turn.

Really, you just need Sculptor.

12

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 19, 2023, 06:34:24 am »

If Grammarly tells you one thing and GPT-4 tells you another, who do you trust?

Grammarly wants to put a comma after "time" in this sentence; GPT-4 says nah

In the second case, the x-axis denotes time and the y-axis vertical oscillation.

My intuition is with GPT-4 but idk, I don't know any grammar rules; I've learned English by pattern-matching not learning rules. But I feel like Grammarly is inconsistent and doesn't generally want commas in this kind of sentence

Not an expert, but this is my intuition:

Grammarly seems to think the structure of the sentence is like this

In the second case, [stuff that is specific to the second case], and [now I'm no longer talking about the second case but the general setting].

In which case I think the comma would be appropriate because it bounds a parenthesis. But the actual structure is:

In the second case, [stuff that is specific to the second case] and [other stuff also specific to the second case].

So the parenthesis stops only at the end of the sentence, and thus no further comma should be used.

13

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #202: Extra! Read all about it!

« on: October 18, 2023, 10:46:39 am »

Insurance - $5
Treasure/Duration

At the start of your next turn, take the Coffers from this. If there were none, take an extra turn after that one (but not a third turn in a row).
Until then, when anyone gains a Silver, put a Coffers on this.

14

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #202: Extra! Read all about it!

« on: October 18, 2023, 02:02:08 am »

Survey Station: $5
The next time a player gains a Victory card,
take an extra turn after this one, but not two extra turns in a row.

gotta keep track of whose turn it will be after all the extra turns finish.

Seems to me like in 3p, this can lead to situations where one player never gets to make another turn and just sits there while the others piggyback off of one another's turns (though granted, you'd have to have a way to make sure you don't trigger your own Survey Station prematurely).

15

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #202: Extra! Read all about it!

« on: October 17, 2023, 09:39:47 am »

Carnival!!

Carnival
Action-Duration. 5$

Take an extra turn after this one. (but not a 3rd turn in a row).
During that Turn, you can only play cards you don't have any copies of in play.

What happen when I play Golem on a Carnival turn and reveal two Villages? I see three options:

• You put Village 2 in play, but it has no effect.
• You discard Village 2, not playing it.
• Village 2 remains in set-aside land for the rest of the game.

I think 3 is the most literal interpretation, but it's weird. Option 2 seems like what should happen, but there is no instruction that ever tells you to discard. Option 1 would be a compromise that could probably be explained in an FAQ.

16

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 16, 2023, 01:15:24 am »

Unrelated, I completely do not understand why the Riemann Hypothesis is the most famous math problem, rather than P =/= NP. On the surface it seems to be about an obscure property of an obscure function that normal people don't even understand, with no practical value. It's said to have all sorts of relevance for prime numbers and whatnot, but I guess you need to know number theory to appreciate those, and I sure don't. Whereas the relevance of P =/= NP is obvious.

Well, I cannot say I knot that much about number theory or complex analysis, but here are my thoughts:

• The Riemann hypothesis is older. The longer a conjecture goes unproven, the more interesting it becomes, simply because it shows how difficult it must be.
• P!=NP really is more of a computer science problem these days. The field has really moved away from the stuff the mathematicians think about (though sure there is still some overlap). Clearly math people are more likely to find a problem interesting that is central to their discipline rather than something that borderline belongs to another field.
• The Riemann hypothesis is all about connecting different fields of mathematics. For this reason, any proof found will likely improve the understanding in both number theory and complex analysis. The actual statement of the theorem will probably be less important than the methods developed to prove it, which would be able to applied in different settings. On the other hand, at least as far as I can tell, a proof of P!=NP is not that likely to involve some seemingly unrelated mathematical field.

I've been wondering what the most important conjecture for me personally would be. Until recently, I would have easily named the Poincaré conjecture, but since it is now proven things are more difficult. I care about the slice-ribbon conjecture, but that is a thing that probably mainly knot theorists are interested in.

17

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 15, 2023, 08:46:34 am »

The thing about non-computable numbers that I immediately think of is that a specification of a number usually gives you a blue print of how you would construct such a turing machine (this is also the case for Liouville's constant I think). So the concept of a good example for a non-computable transcendental number is a little paradoxical. You'd have to specify it in a weird backwards way. Whenever you know a sequence of rationals that converges, I think maybe that's already enough to make it computable? Mabye you also need some property of how fast the seqeunce converges, not sure.

Yeah, I think this is the issue. The talk I heard about them dealt with proving that the results of some exotic invariant in knot theory that takes real values is always computable, basically by constructing the Turing machine.

I think what you'd need to do is find some non-constructive way to define a real number using the axiom of choice, but the issue with that is to find a definition where the value of the resulting real number does not depend on the specific choice made (and at the same time make sure there is no constructive way to define it).

18

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 15, 2023, 05:05:43 am »

Also also, almost all numbers are transcendental, but only two of them are defined in non-ugly ways. Typical math stuff.

Fun sidenote: I recently learned about the concept of a computable number (which is basically a real number x for which there is a finite, terminating algorithm that can decide whether y > x or y < x). Turns out every algebraic (i.e. non-transcendental) number is computable, and so are pi and e. However since you can enumerate them with Turing machines, they still form a countable set and thus almost all real numbers are non-computable (but we don't really have any good examples of those).

19

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #201: Expand the Kingdom

« on: October 09, 2023, 08:56:04 am »

Misanthropic
Trait
When you play a misanthropic card, each player may reveal a bane card from their hand. If you revealed one, then anyone who didn't reveal one gains a curse.
Setup: Add an extra kingdom pile costing $2 or $3 to the supply. Its cards are banes.

Is the idea that in games with Young Witch and this, there will be one bane pile for both?

20

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 09, 2023, 08:52:47 am »

jumping from a high enough building? Actually I didn't really have anything concrete in mind.

Seems like concrete is exactly what you had in mind!

21

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 05, 2023, 11:29:57 am »

Though if anything high taxes seem better, especially if you take out Signapore, which is not democratic and arguably is run in a way that's not replicable

I mean you say high taxes seem better which implies you're thinking it leads to social cohesion, but I would argue this could also be the other way around; if social cohesion is high, people are probably more likely to accept high taxes.

There is also a lot more granularity in income tax in particular, you can have the same tax volume with a flat tax and a tax that goes up to 100% but I would imagine this correlates to social cohesion in very different ways.

22

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: The Necro Wars

« on: October 05, 2023, 02:30:46 am »

"or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof". Seems clear-cut to me.

Well, I'm not sure what qualifies as "aid or comfort", I would guess the original intention is something along the lines of providing shelter to armed rebels. Trump hasn't really done this, the support he's given that I'm aware of is mostly through his stated opinions (though it's possible he's done something like supported their legal defense, that wouldn't surprise me).

But anyways, it's murky enough that when it goes before a right-wing Supreme Court, they would dismiss it, so Trump really has nothing to worry about in this regard.

23

Rules Questions / Re: Errata to extra turns

« on: October 04, 2023, 11:11:31 am »

Other random question:

3-player game. On my turn, I play two Possessions. On the first possessed turn, I make the player 2 play a Possession. Player 3 now takes a possessed turn. I then get to possess player 2 again?

Or alternatively, all turns beyond the first Possession turn fail because they are all "extra turns in a row", even if they are not extra turns by the same player? But then that would mean that Possession also fails if I play it on a Mission turn?

24

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #200: Do What You Love

« on: September 29, 2023, 01:51:55 pm »

I like choices, as long as they don't take way too long.

Warlock(v7)


Here, both players make a choice. The attacked player decides which cards to reveal to avoid a Curse, while the attacker chooses whether they discard those cards or gain a Curse.

"Any number of cards" includes 0 cards.

Yup. You can choose to reveal 0 cards. Then the attacker chooses whether they want you to discard 0 cards or gain a Curse. Guess what? They'll probably choose the Curse option.

Seems like it is always optimal to reveal 0 cards. Then you deny a choice to your opponent and don't reveal parts of your hand.

25

Weekly Design Contest / Re: Weekly Design Contest #199: Composition in Blue

« on: September 28, 2023, 02:23:43 am »

Thanks for the judging! I just wanted to clear up a misconception:

-: I see two issues with the Reaction in 3+ player games. One is when two players react at once; if player 1 triggers endgame and players 2 and 3 react at once, play continues to player 3's turn and so player 2's Surveyor ends up doing nothing. The other is the potential for payoff to backfire; player 1 ends the game, player 3 reacts, but player 2 gets more VP on their extra turn than 3 does, which may be enough to put them ahead. With very few windows in which to use it, there may be no opportunity to control this.

Players never react "at once". In the situation described, player 2 would get the opportunity to react first, and only after that is it player 3's turn. So player 3 can always hold off on using their Reaction.

I see the issue of player 2 potentially getting a free ride, so to speak. It still benefits player 3 to react, because they wouldn't do it if they're already ahead, but it is not ideal if all the reaction does is give the win from player 1 to player 2.