« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2011, 09:01:04 pm »
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SourceI agree that there's a downside to attack-to-the-left and such in a game where some players may never attack (I think it's fine in games where everyone is always attacking). I don't agree that it's worse than picking who to attack. If we are picking who to attack, I will be spending the evening trying to convince other players to do things that are to my advantage ("attack Tom, he's winning, man my draws have been horrible, did you see Tom bought the first Gold, ugh, we're not catching him anyway"), rather than, say, playing the game. I hate that. I feel like I'm a good whiner, but it's just not what I want to do with my time.
Whereas if there's an attack-to-the-left card, then I can be sad if I'm sitting next to the guy who always buys that card and happy if I'm sitting by someone who never does, but either way, I make the best of the situation via my strategy in the game, and spend no time on politics.
Dominion currently has a few cards that make seating matter in order to get at information in good-sized quantities. Envoy is an example; we can have the player to your left pick the card for you to discard, whereas having all opponents vote on it or something is just not feasible. It's nice if the player to your left is bad at picking the card for you to discard to Envoy (for the situations where it's not trivial), and sad if they're great at it, but it's not significant enough to have ever made someone ask to randomize the seating order. That is my target with cards like that. If there's ever an attack-to-the-left card, I expect it to be something that wasn't possible otherwise and which doesn't make people demand to randomize seating order.
In general attacking just one player doesn't work in Dominion anyway; the attack has to be three times as powerful as a normal attack, in a 4 player game, in order to be worth buying, and I can't make the attacks that powerful or it's too painful being hit by them. This is also why I don't have anything like a Moat that gives the attacker a Curse; it amounts to attacking that one player, and your attack is very small from your perspective (one out of three opponents got -1 vp, which is like you gaining 1/3 of a vp, ignoring the bit about how it also messes up their draws), but large from their perspective (if they played Witch, the Cursing part was completely nullified by just one player, and if multiple people have these Cursing Moats, you would have been better off not attacking). You're the one deciding to buy the reaction, and don't have sufficient incentive to buy it, and they're the one deciding to buy the attack, and there's a strong incentive not to. So it just makes cards go unplayed.