Dominion > Puzzles and Challenges

Blooki's Puzzle #4 - Covert Curses

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Blooki:
timchen the Puzzlemaster, Bob the Village Idiot, Nhu Bi the Noob and Zero R. Hero are playing their first Dominion match. They understand and abide by the rules perfectly, but their decisions and strategies are questionable to say the least. Though you have to give them credit for experimenting and trying to learn on their own. Throughout the entirety of the game, other than Curse, no two players have gained cards of the same name.

After many clumsy turns, Zero R. Hero realizes at the beginning of his turn that he can end the game on piles by buying the final curse although he is unsure if that will give him the victory. You see, this match has reached a curious game state. All four of our players are holding no cards in their hands and have no cards in their draw or discard decks.

Uninterested in such an anomaly, Zero R. Hero proceeds to buy the final curse. Ironically, the supply stacks of Sea Hag, Young Witch, Mountebank, Familiar, Torturer and Jester all remain untouched as they have been all game.

Our foursome then begins to tally up their points only to discover that they've all tied at a score of -1!!! If only our hero could've lived up to his name, victory would have been his.

How is this possible?

Oh yeah, no Masquerade (you're not getting by that gain constraint that easily ;)).

chwhite:
One person King's Courted an Island, setting aside three Curses; one person has a Curse under his/her Native Village mat, another set aside one last turn from Haven, leaving Zero R Hero.

Now we just need to figure out how exactly they got to this game state with no cards. I am assuming Saboteur and some trashers more expensive than Chapel (so they can be hit by the Sab) are involved. Swindler might help as well.  I will also go out on a limb and guess that the Haven player actually has a few Havens out, at least one of which is holding said Saboteur.

Blooki:
::sigh:: Guess I'm going to have to make it harder.

HockeyHippo:
I love these puzzles! I'm pretty bad at them, just at first glances though. I haven't sat down and really tried hard to figure them out, but I love reading the answers! :P

mischiefmaker:
Hang on a second, Blooki -- either I'm missing something, or this puzzle's a bit harder than we think. chwhite's solution contains Island, King's Court, Native Village, Haven, and at least one more card to do all the trashing. The puzzle specified 6 of the cards in the Supply (Witch, Young Witch, Jester, Mountebank, Familiar, Torturer); that means any solution can have at most one more kingdom card, for a total of 11 with a Bane.

If that card is Saboteur, there's no way to trash the Native Village, starting Estates/Coppers, or other Curses that would be required to empty the Curse pile.

If that card is Swindler, who has the Swindler? Zero can't have it, else it would be in his hand. If the Native Village player has it, there's no way to remove the Native Village from his deck. Same for the Island/KC player (who would have KC/swindler in hand). If the Haven player has it, he can swindle the NV and KC from the other two players, but in order to get rid of those cards entirely, he would have to exhaust all KC, NV, and Estate, which causes a 3-pile ending, plus there's no way to remove his own Estates and Coppers.

I'm working on an alternate solution, but no luck so far.

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