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[GendoIkari]

Note that Diadem transforms villages into peddlers Bazaars, and that the +3 card Road transforms villages into triple labs.

You know. For power level comparison.

ftfy

That's not quite right. With Diadem, you either get the +$1 or the +1 Action from your villages, but not both.

But neither does Road make villages triple Labs. It's more double-Labs. You can't count the Road itself in the draw. The Road just gives you a Smithy after all the conversion is done. Similarly, the Diadem is a Silver after the conversion.

Yeah I realized that and deleted my post, but apparently not in time.

[GendoIkari]

Ah, yeah, I think I get it now. You're right. Perhaps +2 Cards is more reasonable. Although, again, you have to draw Road early.

I think the most important thing I learned from Donald while playtesting Adventures, it's to try the crazy-looking version first. That way if it works, you get to have something that looks crazy. And it's nice to have cool-looking cards than mediocre-looking cards.

Yes but the cards in Adventures ARE crazy. Especially spoilers and spoilers.

[LastFootnote]

Ah, yeah, I think I get it now. You're right. Perhaps +2 Cards is more reasonable. Although, again, you have to draw Road early.

I think the most important thing I learned from Donald while playtesting Adventures, it's to try the crazy-looking version first. That way if it works, you get to have something that looks crazy. And it's nice to have cool-looking cards than mediocre-looking cards.

Yes but the cards in Adventures ARE crazy. Especially spoilers and spoilers.

I think the word you're looking for is "awesome". The cards in Adventures are awesome, especially spoilers and spoilers.

[Awaclus]

Especially spoilers and spoilers.

Oh, you mean Bandit Camp and Marauder? Or is it Pillage?

[Asper]

I like the mandatory gain. It makes the card feel more dependant on the board to me. If there are other Villages, you got to balance which and how many of them you gain. Or maybe you just want Town itself, for the action - but how to deal with the appendage? Would you buy one to push your Gardens or Vineyard? Town isn't strictly better than Village and worse for some use cases, so i'm actually considering whether i should try it at $3 some time (though the name isn't very plausible at that point - i guess you can claim Towns are Villages that have Roads leading to them...). It's funny how we once said that Road should cost $4 on its own, and now it seems weak even if you get a Village for free (at least without other Villages). I'm not sure where this will lead.

Making the gain of Road conditional takes a lot of the decision out, i think. Sure, even if something is conditional, you don't always want to do it - but you have to make the decision easier if you want to make sure fulfilling the condition feels like it "pays off". So that's what gets us to the +3 cards variant. My problem: The question isn't anymore about how to handle/balance Roads, but about how to reach that condition. And really, how different are conditions in Dominion? It's always "reach a good deck fast" or "be set back and return to a good deck fast". That's, like, something we try to do every game, isn't it? Well, slogs aside.

One condition i mentioned earlier is to return a card from your hand to your deck. If i do a condition, i think that's the one i'll take. Province discarding just doesn't thrill me. It was on Tournament. And hey, it's on Sultan, too. Actually, i'm currently leaning towards re-adding the third +action part back on Nouveau Riche, and that would be three cards in one set. Besides i like my cards to be multiplayer-friendly, and i don't think this kind of thing is. Towns will run out, it won't feel like it pays, Stan will draw it dead once with his Torturer and tell us how it lost him the game for weeks. It really feels like on-gain Tournament to me, and i don't want another one. Oh, and Explorer reveals them, so i guess i just don't feel the "do stuff with Province" design space is very spacey anymore.

Duchy is a different thing, but again, there's allready Nouveau Riche. While i'm not doing a "set", i wanted to make the cards as easy and different as possible, and this feels a bit like two ideas glued together.

Sorry for being so ignorant of your ideas

[LastFootnote]

It's cool, dude. It's your set and you should do what you want. If you don't use the "discard Province on gain", that just means I feel better about doing it in Enterprise. Hmm, "When you gain this, discard any number of Victory cards and take that many Trade tokens."

I like the mandatory gain. It makes the card feel more dependant on the board to me. If there are other Villages, you got to balance which and how many of them you gain. Or maybe you just want Town itself, for the action - but how to deal with the appendage? Would you buy one to push your Gardens or Vineyard? Town isn't strictly better than Village and worse for some use cases, so i'm actually considering whether i should try it at $3 some time (though the name isn't very plausible at that point - i guess you can claim Towns are Villages that have Roads leading to them...). It's funny how we once said that Road should cost $4 on its own, and now it seems weak even if you get a Village for free (at least without other Villages). I'm not sure where this will lead.

The thing is, I think you want fewer Roads than villages, especially now that additional Roads you draw in a turn are basically Confusions. So Road seems weak by itself (without villages available), and not all that strong with an equal number of villages (current version with no other villages available). I think its strength is when you have a couple of Roads and a bunch of villages.

[scott_pilgrim]

What about something like "When you buy this, gain a Town or a Road", and then bump it up to $5 if necessary?  I don't like having the Roads forced on you, because you probably end up with more than you want.  Giving you the option to balance it out with more villages makes it easier to get the ideal ratio of actions to roads.  Though I think you would have to be careful with the wording, because you end up gaining the Town you just bought from the on-buy before you gain it from having bought it, so you only end up with one Town when you're clearly intended to get two.

Another option would be to just make it +3 Actions instead of +2 Actions (and probably bump the price up).

[LastFootnote]

Another option would be to just make it +3 Actions instead of +2 Actions (and probably bump the price up).

This sounds promising.

[pacovf]

I like the mandatory gain. It makes the card feel more dependant on the board to me. If there are other Villages, you got to balance which and how many of them you gain. Or maybe you just want Town itself, for the action - but how to deal with the appendage? Would you buy one to push your Gardens or Vineyard? Town isn't strictly better than Village and worse for some use cases, so i'm actually considering whether i should try it at $3 some time (though the name isn't very plausible at that point - i guess you can claim Towns are Villages that have Roads leading to them...). It's funny how we once said that Road should cost $4 on its own, and now it seems weak even if you get a Village for free (at least without other Villages). I'm not sure where this will lead.

You're getting this backwards, I think. As LFN said, you don't want many Roads, probably only 2 (+/-1) and tons of villages. By having the gain be compulsory, you get yourself in a tough spot: too few Towns and then Road can't shine, or too many and then you are drowning in stop cards . If there are other villages, then you just get a couple of town/roads and piledrive the other village. Otherwise, town seems like a no-no, since you are effectively cursing yourself with each town you buy.

What I am trying to say is, if you make the gain compulsory, you are not solving the problem of "Road is dead if there are no villages in the kingdom".

That's why I suggest to change town if you want to make the gain compulsory. Adding some sifting into it seems like a natural fit, but there are other possibilities, probably. Also, think about which card you want to be in the supply, because it will illustrate what you think the focus of the card couple should be.

You can also make a relatively simple condition, like "if you have 2 unused Actions", to justify using the +2 card Road. Not something you have to particularly work towards, but that still represents an extra cost to get the "free" card.

[Co0kieL0rd]

I basically agree with everybody else who said that plain "When you gain Town, gain a Road" is not a good idea, and there have been good reasons named for why it isn't. I would like a conditional on-gain or on-buy decision to gain a Road so it's not too easy to get it. You don't want many Roads anyway. However, I don't particularly like LFN's suggestion to discard a Province. Maybe a Duchy or Victory card in general?

[LastFootnote]

I basically agree with everybody else who said that plain "When you gain Town, gain a Road" is not a good idea, and there have been good reasons named for why it isn't. I would like a conditional on-gain or on-buy decision to gain a Road so it's not too easy to get it. You don't want many Roads anyway. However, I don't particularly like LFN's suggestion to discard a Province. Maybe a Duchy or Victory card in general?

Victory card in general is sort of a non-cost, since you usually start with 3 Estates. I like Duchy.

[Asper]

I thought about this, and i guess you guys are right. I imagined Town to be a Village+, which is why i costed it at $4 before. Problem is, mandatory gain doesn't make Town a Village+,  actually it's worse than default Village on many occasions. As i said, i thought about costing it at $3, but that doesn't solve the main problem. I thought having to "deal" with Roads was a good idea. There are one or two cards that do a thing like this, like Rats, but i can't even claim i actually enjoy those cards, really. So probably that just was a bad idea.

Partly i imagined the mandatory gain as a nerf. There are better ways to achieve that, but part of what i liked was that mandatory gaining was a very simple one.

So... What about just "you may"? Would un-nerfed Town be too good? You are paying $4 for Road (more than i planned originally) but get a free Village. Or you pay $4... for a Village. If this is balanced, i'd like it, i think.

[Co0kieL0rd]

In whatever way Town enables you to gain a Road, as long as it says "+1 Card. +2 Actions. [Something else.]" it has to cost either more or less than ordinary Village. So it cannot cost $3. DXV wrote somewhere something like "if Village and Village+ (in this case Town) were in the same Kingdom and both cost $3, that would just seem wrong."

[LastFootnote]

So... What about just "you may"? Would un-nerfed Town be too good? You are paying $4 for Road (more than i planned originally) but get a free Village. Or you pay $4... for a Village. If this is balanced, i'd like it, i think.

Seems like a good place to start.

[GendoIkari]

Fun puzzle: when would it make a difference which of the two cards is in the supply, and which is a zero-cost extra pile?

That's easy... when you use a trash-for-benefit on one of them. But that could be eliminated by giving the non-supply card a cost of $4*.

Second edge case; Band of Misfits can be one of them, but not the other.

[scott_pilgrim]

I actually agree with you (Asper) that there are some interesting things that result from the version of Town with the forced Road gain, and it wouldn't be a bad card like that.  It's just that it could be a lot better.  Road is already such a cool card that I feel like it's sort of a waste to use it on the version that gives you too many of them, because you don't really get to take advantage of what makes Road fun.  I feel like Town/Road should be as straightforward (not sure if that's the right word...) as possible, and then if you want to make another card that has that kind of village/terminal balancing act, that should be its own thing.

[Asper]

In whatever way Town enables you to gain a Road, as long as it says "+1 Card. +2 Actions. [Something else.]" it has to cost either more or less than ordinary Village. So it cannot cost $3. DXV wrote somewhere something like "if Village and Village+ (in this case Town) were in the same Kingdom and both cost $3, that would just seem wrong."

While i'm not really looking for $3 Town anymore, i don't think that's true. The existing Village alternatives at $3 (Shanty Town,Fishing Village) don't say +1Card, +2Actions, but that doesn't mean such a card wouldn't work. You'd just have to choose an effect that makes the Para-Village equal in power to normal Village. Forced effects are a way to achieve this.

Anyhow, here's voluntary Town with an updated Road featuring LastFootnote's wording:




Also, here's some small idea i had a while ago, added as a setup clause to Ranger:



I'm aware it doesn't really "fit" on Ranger, but then again i don't think it really "fits" on any specific card - well, maybe Noble Brigand or Nomad Camp... Anyhow, Ranger is nonterminal and costs $2, so it's nice to pair with a $5 - in a way that probably fits, i guess. I'm not exactly sure whether it's a good thing to make the decision for a 2/5 opening easier, but hey, at least you do have a choice. Equal chances and stuff, and who knows, somebody may pick a 3/4. In that way it's not "equal starting hands". I picked "put in any order" over choosing just your five card starting hand because it took me fewer words, mostly.

Meh, now that i wrote this, i'm not that convinced it's a good idea... It doesn't really make Ranger itself more interesting, either.

[Co0kieL0rd]

In whatever way Town enables you to gain a Road, as long as it says "+1 Card. +2 Actions. [Something else.]" it has to cost either more or less than ordinary Village. So it cannot cost $3. DXV wrote somewhere something like "if Village and Village+ (in this case Town) were in the same Kingdom and both cost $3, that would just seem wrong."

While i'm not really looking for $3 Town anymore, i don't think that's true. The existing Village alternatives at $3 (Shanty Town,Fishing Village) don't say +1Card, +2Actions, but that doesn't mean such a card wouldn't work. You'd just have to choose an effect that makes the Para-Village equal in power to normal Village. Forced effects are a way to achieve this.

You missed my point. I was specifically talking about cards that say "+1 Card. +2 Actions. [Something else]." Fishing Village and Shanty Town don't say that so the "rule" doesn't apply here. If you want Town to cost $3, it cannot have plain "+1 Card. +2 Actions." as a vanilla bonus because with the voluntary (or obligatory, or conditional) Road gain it's different from village (not necessarily better or worse, that's not the point) and it includes everything that Village has. Thus it has to have a different cost. Otherwise you have to exclude something on Town that Village has to balance it out if it's supposed to cost $3.

As for Ranger, I think there are better, more clever ways of alternating opening buys. This is just way too simple. Ranger could allow for a one-time mulligan and reshuffle your deck if you don't like your starting hand, for example.

[TheOthin]

Consider a card that said "+1 Card, +2 Actions, Gain a Copper, putting it into your hand." It does what Village does, plus something else. But does it outclass Village? Absolutely not. Either one could be preferred depending on the situation.

A Village with a required on-gain is the same way. Maybe you want the card, maybe you don't. Some cards are pretty much always good to gain for free, but Road is not one of those cards. Once you have a couple, you'd prefer gaining regular Villages over ones that force a Road on you. This does not apply to cards where the on-gain is optional, like the current Town.

[Asper]

Consider a card that said "+1 Card, +2 Actions, Gain a Copper, putting it into your hand." It does what Village does, plus something else. But does it outclass Village? Absolutely not. Either one could be preferred depending on the situation.

A Village with a required on-gain is the same way. Maybe you want the card, maybe you don't. Some cards are pretty much always good to gain for free, but Road is not one of those cards. Once you have a couple, you'd prefer gaining regular Villages over ones that force a Road on you. This does not apply to cards where the on-gain is optional, like the current Town.

Thanks, that was what i was trying to say.

Donald wrote why he is against cards that are (what we have come to call) "strictly better" than others. He never said anything about cards that are "strictly more complex". Mandatory Town is more complex than Village, but not better.

[LastFootnote]

But the problem is one of perception in the first place. And Mandatory Town looks better than Village to the kind of people that complain about this sort of thing.

[Asper]

But the problem is one of perception in the first place. And Mandatory Town looks better than Village to the kind of people that complain about this sort of thing.

Can't really argue about that. I wonder whether there are people that say Rats was better than cantrip trashing because it gains copies of itself.

[TheOthin]

It's certainly strange and awkward when the effect of being forced to gain a card that's "supposed" to be desirable turns out to be a noteworthy disadvantage.

[Asper]

It's certainly strange and awkward when the effect of being forced to gain a card that's "supposed" to be desirable turns out to be a noteworthy disadvantage.

I don't even disagree, sorry if it sounded like that. Rats IS one of the cards that make Dark Ages the weirdest expansion in my book. Mandatory Town is off the table for a lot of good reasons that were pointed out, and i still do like it better as a Village+, which also means it should be "better" than Village. That also fits the name better. I like the name.

[Co0kieL0rd]

I'm glad it's off the table. I' starting to chum up with the version of Town that gives you the option of gaining a Road on-gain. It's still often enough going to be a non-trivial decision, while the concept itself is simple which I like. The situation will be a whole lot different with another Village on the board but any terminal draw will look more attractive with a Village on board.