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[schadd]

Code: [Select]

Embargo, Lighthouse, Village, Farming Village, Scavenger, Butcher, Horn of Plenty, Mandarin, Fairgrounds, Bank
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160203/log.0.1454472456625.txt

a recurring theme i've been noticing in my latest few games is that fairgrounds is actually a really good card. i mean, at some point i was the average joe that was just like, what? excuse me, mr. winder and mr. sayno, there's no way that fairgrounds is in the upper tier of cards. it's always been at or below the midpoint of its respective qvist ranking, that's where it belongs. i mean, seriously, you need to get like 4 cards that you maybe wouldn't have gotten anyway to make it worthwhile.

how foolish i was. province, duchy, estate, copper, silver, gold, you can expect to always get. in addition to that you need to get 9 kingdom cards, or 8+curse, to make fairgrounds a $6 province. with shelters that's only 5/6 kingdom cards, although now the ceiling is higher as long as you don't trash any of the shelters. perhaps the cards that artificially inflate variety are not actually that helpful in general, though—ruins are indicative of a game where it's hard to do all the stuff necessary to get your uniques (what if there's, like, 3 other $6s?) and who's really keeping track of how many different ruins they got? and tournament games oftentimes go too fast for the drawn-out nature of fairgrounds to shine.

anyway, in many cases, i find 6pt fairgrounds to be very worth the effort. this is one of those times.

glance at the kingdom, it's pretty austere. there isn't really any sort of strong bm utility, and one might expect the game to  game to progress like a statistical analysis section of a research paper: no one really knows what's actually going on or what should happen and you kinda just hope no one pays attention. does butcher-bm beat scavenger-bm? the simulator probably doesn't play either very well and neither do you, and why would either of you want to?

anyway, fairgrounds makes this kingdom much more interesting. i maybe had a bit of an advantage because the other guy saw me buying villages and that sort of garbage and thought, oh, that's probably the way to go. it's a pretty easy kingdom for fairgrounds, perhaps on the cheaper side and nothing that is too weak outside of an engine context. i think embargo is slightly out of the favor of fairgrounds, if the other guy notices you're pursuing the fairgrounds storyline then he can embargo it pretty quickly and it doesn't count as a unique because you trashed it, except you can kinda sneak attack embargo province i guess and then dive into fairgrounds faster than he can.

horn of plenty/mandarin nonsense at the end to close it out.

so, what do you, as a player, think of fairgrounds? i feel like we discuss it very little for how frequently it is worth considering, and perhaps as well it is a bit underrated. i always like it when one of the top players swoops in and comments something, so uh.

[Limetime]

To me that looks like a scavenger/butcher BM. Fairgrounds  will be worth like 4. The butcher player can just mill lots of provinces before the fairgrounds player can do much. Butcher player can also deny fairgrounds if needed because they will be worth 4 VP. Turn 17 seems lucky but I'm not sure.

[LastFootnote]

You get a +1 just for the title of this thread.

[Dingan]

Well obvious Fairgrounds enablers are:

• Black Market
• Tournament (debatable, because Tournament games tend to end quickly)
• Ruins (debatable, because who wants Ruins in the first place?)
• Knights (debatable, because you usually don't keep Knights until end of game)
• Shelters (kinda)
• Colony/Platinum (kinda)
• When you actually want 8 to 10 Kingdom cards and some Treasures, for reasons mostly other than just Fairgrounds

It looks like (7) applied in your case.  So good work.  I'm not convinced about Butcher/Scavenger-BM here (although, certainly up for convincement).

[luser]

Yes, fairgrounds are too slow here, butcher-bm with scavenger opening demolishes it unless it has terrible shuffle luck.

Here is example game where butcher could end game in 18 turns with 7 provinces and one province->province trashing. At that point you have only 4 fairgrounds. I used colony game vs bot as  substitute for  fairgrounds player not buying provinces.

https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160203/log.0.1454485668082.txt

[Roadrunner7671]

You get a +1 just for the title of this thread.

[funkdoc]

yea i agree with the majority here, and i'm going through the same process wrt fairgrounds

i'm tempted to say butcher & ironmonger are the most underrated BM enablers at this point...

[eHalcyon]

HoP-Mandarin golden deck: the dream!  No support to draw the combo the first time though.

[AdamH]

I'll echo the Horn/Mandarin sentiment -- you have no way to draw the requisite five cards together so it's not worth going for. I mean, if you find yourself with Copper/Silver/Gold/Bank/Horn in hand then by all means go for it, but there's no other reason to buy Horn on this board so yeah, that ain't gon' work.

I'll also echo the approval of the title of this thread. Well played, sir.

I believe I ranked Fairgrounds higher than most, but I ranked a lot of green cards higher than most. The main mistake I make with Fairgrounds is deciding whether or not I want to go for them too early. Sure, if it's a clear engine then yeah it's another stack of green, which helps a lot. But if not, then there's no reason you have to decide whether or not you're going for them before the game begins. This is certainly one of those cases.

So I'd open Scavenger/Silver, get a Butcher or three, get some Golds, and do the thing. You may find me getting a Tactical Mandarin™ at some point. Butcher is a super-good card so I expect the game to be somewhat quick, so I don't expect Fairgrounds to enter play most of the time; I'm certainly not going to go putting a card in my deck that's less than the best for the possibility of Fairgrounds if I don't think it's going to end up happening (a single Lighthouse over Silver is tempting at some point, especially as a Butcher gain, and may be OK to do, but by the time that's worth considering you'll certainly know what's up).

This decision is best made on the first shuffle you buy Provinces. See what it takes to make them worth more than Duchies and ask whether or not it's worth it, then make a judgment call. The thing is, Embargo is a card and I can see situations in this game where I'd get one (I'm behind very early on and/or got a bad draw -- like a $2 hand with no Butcher or something awful like that.) and Embargo Provinces or something. Butcher helps, but I could easily see this pushing the game towards Fairgrounds.

A lot of getting good at Dominion is knowing when to stop and think. This also means knowing when to not think about things until later -- sure, there's a lot to think about before your first turn, but I rarely find myself thinking "this game will end on a three-pile of X, Y, and Z" or "I want A copies of B in my deck before turning for green" that early on. Committing to these things before seeing your opponent's play and your draws seems much worse than knowing when you finally have enough information and flexibility to actually make that decision in the middle of the game. If you don't know when to think about a question, ask yourself that question every turn until you think you know -- then subtract one turn. That's when to think about it

[Dingan]

A lot of getting good at Dominion is knowing when to stop and think. This also means knowing when to not think about things until later -- sure, there's a lot to think about before your first turn, but I rarely find myself thinking "this game will end on a three-pile of X, Y, and Z" or "I want A copies of B in my deck before turning for green" that early on. Committing to these things before seeing your opponent's play and your draws seems much worse than knowing when you finally have enough information and flexibility to actually make that decision in the middle of the game. If you don't know when to think about a question, ask yourself that question every turn until you think you know -- then subtract one turn. That's when to think about it

Wow, these are very wise words.  My one tweak would be instead of "Don't commit to things until you have enough information to actually make that decision", I would say "Commit to what you can, when you can".  So like, instead of saying "I don't know how many of B I want before turning green, and therefore I'm not even going to think about it until later when I do know.", I would rather say "I don't know how many of B I want before turning green.  But I know for an absolute fact I want at least A because of X. If my opponent does Y, or Z happens, then I will want to pick up C1 more of B; else I will want to pick up C2 more of B.".

Maybe I'm overthinking it.  But yes, I totally agree that you should not make huge game-long "plans", when we all know how those usually go..

[singletee]

Tactical Mandarin™

Great commentary, but I had to stop and click the up-arrow halfway through for this alone.

[AdamH]

Wow, these are very wise words.  My one tweak would be instead of "Don't commit to things until you have enough information to actually make that decision", I would say "Commit to what you can, when you can".

Yeah, we're saying pretty much the exact same thing here. At the start of the game I try to think about the best decks that can be built and how I'm going to get my deck there as quickly as possible. After a few turns I may re-evaluate some things...

I started typing the rest of that thought and realized that both you and I have already said it. I'll just be done now.

[WanderingWinder]

I must admit, I don't understand the tile. I mean, I get that it's trying to be a pun, but I don't understand what's supposed to be unfair about Fairgrounds. "A second stack of Provinces" is I think how Stef has put it. And they've only gotten better over time (ruins, Shelters, etc)

In this game, there is no engine possible, which doesn't rule Fairgrounds out entirely, as they can still easily be worth some amount of points as a more 'normal' alt VP. And if games go long enough, then yeah, they might even be worth taking to 6, but at least 4.

But as mentioned, Butcher (and no attacks) mean the game very much isn't likely to last very long, so maaaybe they're worth 4, but probably they're not doing anything here. A comment was made about perhaps butchering Estates into LH instead of silver for the sake of Fairgrounds; I assume that ti's already worth it for the sake of having a coin token, though. Silver>LH here, but not by a whole token's worth, I don't think.

[jaybeez]

I must admit, I don't understand the tile. I mean, I get that it's trying to be a pun ...

Perhaps you did understand after all.

[AdamH]

I'm a sucker for puns, especially Before-And-After style ones

[schadd]

I must admit, I don't understand the tile. I mean, I get that it's trying to be a pun, but I don't understand what's supposed to be unfair about Fairgrounds.

you're starting from a mistaken assumption that it's supposed to make sense in context

[Jack Rudd]

The only time I would think of those cards as Unfairgrounds is if one of them appeared in the Black Market deck.