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Author Topic: Interview with Donald X.  (Read 2127248 times)

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ipofanes

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1600 on: November 10, 2014, 03:25:38 am »
+8

Did you write it with the same amount of irony we've come to expect, compared to blurbs that are written with different amounts of irony?

It was definitely written with a lot of irony compared to the less ironic expansion blurbs, but less irony when compared with some of the more ironic expansion blurbs.

That's fair enough. They can't all be the least ironic blurb ever.
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market squire

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1601 on: December 08, 2014, 05:11:11 am »
+2

We're happy to get more Dominion cards. But for people who play with all cards randomly, do you see a problem in having so many cards? Just because with only one or two sets, you are likely to get interesting kingdoms; with all sets, it is more likely to draw no-combo kingdoms, like 10 Villages.

For that reason, I created "card pools" that contain specific cards from each set which may be interesting to play with combined (like, "buying decisions", "cantrips", "combo with Copper", or just "power cards").

Do you recommend any restrictions on kingdom generating?
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qmech

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1602 on: December 08, 2014, 05:56:39 am »
+2

Just because with only one or two sets, you are likely to get interesting kingdoms; with all sets, it is more likely to draw no-combo kingdoms, like 10 Villages.

I don't want to take away from the rest of your question, but this part isn't actually true.  Provided the total proportion of villages stays constant, extreme numbers of villages become less likely as the card pool grows.  There are more Kingdoms with lots of villages, but there are also far more Kingdoms in total, and the numbers work out so that having lots of villages becomes less likely.

EDIT: No.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2014, 04:12:33 pm by qmech »
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market squire

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1603 on: December 08, 2014, 07:27:40 am »
0

I'm not sure about the exact maths behind it. Maybe you are right if we consider only Villages (despite you won't find 10 Villages in 2 sets, but we could count kingdoms with at least 5 Villages).
But I'm pretty sure that it is less likely to have synergistic kingdoms in general when playing with all cards.
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ipofanes

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1604 on: December 08, 2014, 07:55:03 am »
+10

The number of villages in the kingdom should follow a hypergeometric distribution. If the proportion of villages per expansion is constant, it should approximate a binomial distribution which you should get if you draw from the same expansion with replacement. The variance of the hypergeometric is lower than of the binomial, so the probability to draw kingdoms with 8 villages should increase in the number of expansions.

If the proportion of synergies is constant between kingdoms the same should hold. The probability both to draw very synergistic and very combo-lacking kingdoms should increase. But there's a caveat here. Everybody knows for instance that Scout, generally a sought-after $4 card, is especially powerful when in the same kingdom with Great Hall, Harem, or Nobles. They all "happen to be" in the same expansion. If synergies within an expansion are especially manifold, even if the number of synergies is similar between expansions, the proportion of synergetic kingdoms will decrease rather than increase with the number of expansions.
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Asper

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1605 on: December 08, 2014, 08:04:37 am »
0

Just because with only one or two sets, you are likely to get interesting kingdoms; with all sets, it is more likely to draw no-combo kingdoms, like 10 Villages.

I don't want to take away from the rest of your question, but this part isn't actually true.  Provided the total proportion of villages stays constant, extreme numbers of villages become less likely as the card pool grows.  There are more Kingdoms with lots of villages, but there are also far more Kingdoms in total, and the numbers work out so that having lots of villages becomes less likely.

Well, that depends on how many expansions you allready have.

Let's assume you only have Base Dominion, so you own exactly 2 Villages (Village and Festival). The chance of having more then two in one set is 0. Let's assume you then buy the new, yet unrevealed expansion, and that expansion has only two Villages for 35 kingdom cards. This decreases the Village density, and your chance to have 1 or 2 Villages in a kingdom goes down. The chance to have 3 or 4 of them in one kingdom goes up, though, as it was zero before and isn't anymore. So in a way market squire is right, as you need to own a certain number of X before lining up that number of X becomes possible in the first place. Of course, if you allready own 10 Villages and buy the mentioned expansion, the chance of hitting Village-heavy kingdoms goes down, in general.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1606 on: December 08, 2014, 10:19:52 am »
+10

We're happy to get more Dominion cards. But for people who play with all cards randomly, do you see a problem in having so many cards? Just because with only one or two sets, you are likely to get interesting kingdoms; with all sets, it is more likely to draw no-combo kingdoms, like 10 Villages.

For that reason, I created "card pools" that contain specific cards from each set which may be interesting to play with combined (like, "buying decisions", "cantrips", "combo with Copper", or just "power cards").

Do you recommend any restrictions on kingdom generating?
At some point transporting everything is too hard; I recommend not doing that. You can play with everything at home, or just bring a subset with you to a game night. You can have the subset be random if you do the thing where you have little packets of cards, a plastic thing holding the 10 copies of a card, and you just shuffle those around in a big box and grab some for the evening. Or you can just bring two or three boxes with you and play those cards. I have mostly only played with two expansions at once irl.

Using just a couple sets at once, you will see the synergies built into the sets more often. That's a benefit of playing just a couple sets. It's fun to mix it up too though.

When making a game such as this, it's an immediate question: can you get away with pure random. It's great if you can, but sometimes to make things work you have to compartmentalize to some degree. Obv. I felt I could get away with pure random with Dominion. Categories of cards that I want to appear at certain frequencies, appear at certain frequencies; when a particular category doesn't appear in some games, that's a feature not a bug. I have not noticed any issues when playing with a random mix of everything published plus the new set.

Things vary from set to set, and over time as I figured out what I was doing; but the idea has always been, that I can't assume you own any particular sets, and want the game to work for whatever mix of sets you own, and that means making each set provide a good amount of everything I care about.

As always I recommend that people do whatever they want. If you always want Moat in the game, I don't mind. I personally play pure random online (or, pure random except force N cards from the expansion being tested or something similar), and irl play with two expansions (usually 5 cards from each but not always). If you generate a random set of 10 and are displeased with it in some way, you can change it.
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Ozle

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1607 on: December 08, 2014, 02:02:43 pm »
+2



 If you always want Moat in the game,

Grrrr!
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qmech

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1608 on: December 08, 2014, 04:12:08 pm »
+4

@all correcting my maths—mea culpa.  I spend my days looking at extreme events that get less likely as the parameter I'm interested in goes to infinity.  I have never been interested in the "width" of a hypergeometric random variable.  :-[

The true statement would be that Kingdoms with 80% villages get less likely as Kingdom size tends to infinity, which is obviously not relevant.
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blueblimp

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1609 on: December 08, 2014, 04:18:03 pm »
+3

The number of villages in the kingdom should follow a hypergeometric distribution. If the proportion of villages per expansion is constant, it should approximate a binomial distribution which you should get if you draw from the same expansion with replacement. The variance of the hypergeometric is lower than of the binomial, so the probability to draw kingdoms with 8 villages should increase in the number of expansions.
Yes. An intuition here is to realize that it isn't even possible to have 10 villages in a kingdom until you have enough expansions. So the probability must increase, at least for a while. The fact that it never turns around to decrease is because of what you wrote here.

Quote
If the proportion of synergies is constant between kingdoms the same should hold. The probability both to draw very synergistic and very combo-lacking kingdoms should increase.
I don't agree with this, but maybe it depends what is meant by synergy. Consider a simplified case: kingdom size is 2, and every expansion has two kingdom cards, a village and a smithy. Obviously, the more expansions you have, the less likely you are to put out village+smithy, because the only other cases are village+village and smithy+smithy, which become more likely.
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ipofanes

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1610 on: December 09, 2014, 03:18:11 am »
0

If the proportion of synergies is constant between kingdoms the same should hold. The probability both to draw very synergistic and very combo-lacking kingdoms should increase.
I don't agree with this, but maybe it depends what is meant by synergy. Consider a simplified case: kingdom size is 2, and every expansion has two kingdom cards, a village and a smithy. Obviously, the more expansions you have, the less likely you are to put out village+smithy, because the only other cases are village+village and smithy+smithy, which become more likely.

You deleted my caveat starting with "If the synergies within an expansion are especially manifold ...". The proportion of synergies in your example is 100 per cent within an expansion, but only 50 per cent within a pair of expansions.
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ipofanes

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1611 on: December 09, 2014, 03:19:34 am »
0

@all correcting my maths—mea culpa.  I spend my days looking at extreme events that get less likely as the parameter I'm interested in goes to infinity.  I have never been interested in the "width" of a hypergeometric random variable.  :-[

The true statement would be that Kingdoms with 80% villages get less likely as Kingdom size tends to infinity, which is obviously not relevant.

Don't worry. I spent quite some time deleting mentionings of "kingdom" in my post and replacing them with "expansion".
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blueblimp

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1612 on: December 09, 2014, 06:35:12 am »
0

If the proportion of synergies is constant between kingdoms the same should hold. The probability both to draw very synergistic and very combo-lacking kingdoms should increase.
I don't agree with this, but maybe it depends what is meant by synergy. Consider a simplified case: kingdom size is 2, and every expansion has two kingdom cards, a village and a smithy. Obviously, the more expansions you have, the less likely you are to put out village+smithy, because the only other cases are village+village and smithy+smithy, which become more likely.

You deleted my caveat starting with "If the synergies within an expansion are especially manifold ...". The proportion of synergies in your example is 100 per cent within an expansion, but only 50 per cent within a pair of expansions.
I'm confused. I thought the caveat was specifically referring to cards that, like Scout, synergize especially well with other cards from their expansion but not so well with cards from other expansions. But in the example I gave, that's not the case, at least not in an intuitive sense--it seems like a cheat to observe that the village from one expansion doesn't synergize with the village from another expansion. I'm struggling to think of a natural example of how expansions could be set up to increase probability to draw a very synergistic kingdom. (The best I can think of is to deliberately unbalance the expansions, so that, say, one has only villages, and other only terminal draw. But that's a terrible model of how the expansions are actually composed.)
« Last Edit: December 09, 2014, 06:36:37 am by blueblimp »
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ipofanes

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1613 on: December 09, 2014, 09:00:50 am »
0

This is an example of a dispute where examples seem to blur rather than to clarify. You specified an example where the conditional probability of Synergy given "same expansion" is 100 per cent but only 50 per cent when they are from different expansions. It doesn't matter if it's Market Square/Hermit, Village/Smithy or Chancellor/Stash.

Quote
I'm struggling to think of a natural example of how expansions could be set up to increase probability to draw a very synergistic kingdom. (The best I can think of is to deliberately unbalance the expansions, so that, say, one has only villages, and other only terminal draw. But that's a terrible model of how the expansions are actually composed.)

That would be poor design indeed. Closest example would be the duration cards from Seaside and Horn of Plenty. If Cornucopia had more cards that value variety of cards in play, that would be a point. Obviously, if all expansions were random samples of published cards, the amount of synergy would be constant with expansions.

So yes, generally I am with Donald in that I select Kingdoms from two or three pre-specified expansions, at least when playing in real life. Seems that engine potential is higher then.

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jaketheyak

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1614 on: December 09, 2014, 07:48:50 pm »
0

Guilds had a placeholder name I cannot reveal at this time.

I've had a look and can't see if this was ever revealed.
I'm assuming that the reason you couldn't reveal it at the time was because it would spoil the theme.
Are you able to say what the placeholder name was now that Guilds has been released, or is this still a secret?

Was it "Coins" or something?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1615 on: December 09, 2014, 08:04:26 pm »
+2

Guilds had a placeholder name I cannot reveal at this time.

I've had a look and can't see if this was ever revealed.
I'm assuming that the reason you couldn't reveal it at the time was because it would spoil the theme.
Are you able to say what the placeholder name was now that Guilds has been released, or is this still a secret?

Was it "Coins" or something?
Tokens.
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jaketheyak

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1616 on: December 09, 2014, 09:52:59 pm »
+3

On that note, at the recent Pax Australia I went to a talk by Boyan Radakovich on what makes for a good game design.
One of his tips was that you can't underestimate the marketing power of high production values and a game's visual appeal.

The high quality artwork for each individual card is apparent in Dominion, but it's not particularly unique in that regard (see Magic, for instance).
What really impressed me about the production values was when I first got my hands on an expansion with tokens.

Given that most tabletop games tend to come with cardboard or cheap plastic tokens, what drove the decision to use such high quality metal tokens for Dominion?
Was this something you fought for or even had a say in, or was it completely the decision of RGG?
Do you think it made a difference that Dominion was already a hit before the first expansion with tokens was published?
Do they even cost that much more to produce than cardboard/plastic tokens?

Sorry if this seems like a weird thing to ask about. I really like the tokens!
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1617 on: December 10, 2014, 12:45:28 am »
+2

Given that most tabletop games tend to come with cardboard or cheap plastic tokens, what drove the decision to use such high quality metal tokens for Dominion?
Was this something you fought for or even had a say in, or was it completely the decision of RGG?
Do you think it made a difference that Dominion was already a hit before the first expansion with tokens was published?
Do they even cost that much more to produce than cardboard/plastic tokens?
The tokens were entirely Jay. It's fair to say that we expected people would pay what Seaside would cost, that it wasn't a risk there. They'd paid for Dominion and Intrigue. We could have a slightly cheaper product (which eventually happened with Hinterlands), or have nice tokens; why not have the nice tokens? But uh I think a significant thing for Jay was just, this will be cool.

I don't know component prices but I am pretty sure they cost more than cardboard.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1618 on: December 11, 2014, 07:01:02 pm »
+1

In an alternate timeline, Donald X has recently released his new game which is set in a restaurant.  Players are indecisive customers trying to come to a decision about what they should order for each of four courses.  They will gain influence within their social circle as they change their mind about what dish would make a good main course, and of course if we have that then desert has to be one of these two options, nothing else would do!  The first release is set in a Japanese restaurant.  The game is called Tempura.
W. Eric Martin thought the medieval theme had been done too much, and argued that Dominion should have a restaurant theme. [Before it was published.]

Did you explore the restaurant theme for Dominion?  What kept you from pursuing it?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1619 on: December 11, 2014, 07:11:05 pm »
+5

W. Eric Martin thought the medieval theme had been done too much, and argued that Dominion should have a restaurant theme. [Before it was published.]

Did you explore the restaurant theme for Dominion?  What kept you from pursuing it?
I did not take it seriously, and anyway was happy with the medieval theme. No-one else complained about it. Sir Bailey specifically said he hoped they didn't change the theme.
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DStu

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1620 on: December 15, 2014, 05:21:52 am »
+5

W. Eric Martin thought the medieval theme had been done too much, and argued that Dominion should have a restaurant theme. [Before it was published.]

Did you explore the restaurant theme for Dominion?  What kept you from pursuing it?
I did not take it seriously, and anyway was happy with the medieval theme. No-one else complained about it. Sir Bailey specifically said he hoped they didn't change the theme.
Why? He would have fitted to the restaurant theme as well...
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allanfieldhouse

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1621 on: January 06, 2015, 02:49:56 pm »
0

Well it's 2015. Any more info on the expansion (or info about when there will be more info)? Or is it all up to the mythical Jay?

Also, how will the process work for getting the expansion into online dominion? Is that something that won't start until after the expansion is released, or are they going to be able to implement it in advance?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1622 on: January 06, 2015, 04:12:40 pm »
+6

Well it's 2015. Any more info on the expansion (or info about when there will be more info)? Or is it all up to the mythical Jay?

Also, how will the process work for getting the expansion into online dominion? Is that something that won't start until after the expansion is released, or are they going to be able to implement it in advance?
Jay will put up whatever info when he does; I am not sure why this concept is tricky. If somewhere on the net someone had posted some real information, I am sure it would be here at f.ds by now.

Online the expansion will be sold like the others, but will probably not be available in halves, because it turns out no-one ever buys half an expansion. Making Fun would obv. like the expansion to be available online the same day it's in stores, but it has yet to be determined whether or not that will happen. It will depend on what Jay wants and how things go with their new software.
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jaketheyak

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1623 on: January 06, 2015, 05:02:01 pm »
+6

Well it's 2015. Any more info on the expansion (or info about when there will be more info)? Or is it all up to the mythical Jay?

Also, how will the process work for getting the expansion into online dominion? Is that something that won't start until after the expansion is released, or are they going to be able to implement it in advance?
Jay will put up whatever info when he does; I am not sure why this concept is tricky. If somewhere on the net someone had posted some real information, I am sure it would be here at f.ds by now.

Online the expansion will be sold like the others, but will probably not be available in halves, because it turns out no-one ever buys half an expansion. Making Fun would obv. like the expansion to be available online the same day it's in stores, but it has yet to be determined whether or not that will happen. It will depend on what Jay wants and how things go with their new software.

Aha! Donald didn't even bother to deny that Jay is mythical.
I mean, there are videos out there that claim to be interviews with this legendary being, but that Bigfoot video turned out to be fake too.
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jaketheyak

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #1624 on: January 16, 2015, 12:25:05 am »
+1

In the early part of this thread there are a lot of answers that consist of "I can't talk about that until Guilds is released".
Are you prepared to deal with the next three months or so of deflecting questions that you aren't able to answer?

Also, are there any Duration Attack cards in Adventures?  ;)
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