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game #114479396

Far into the game, Lord Rattington plays a Weaver but then freezes, presumably on the decision what to gain.

There are issues with the scaling of certain UI elements in high dpi environments.

On the 4K display of my desktop, this is mostly an aesthetic problem:
- the buttons on pop-up windows (such as the clean up dialog) are oversized and sometimes overlay each other (this was already reported here http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1338.0)
- the radio buttons on the autoplay options are oversized and pixelated

However, when trying to use the game on a small, very high dpi display, the scaling issues make it almost impossible to use. I played one game on a Samsung Galaxy S7 using Chrome. Obviously, playing on such a small screen will always have drawbacks (unless you have really sharp eyes and use a stylus), amd supporting play on a phone outside of a dedicated app may not be a target for you. But still, that is not an excuse for zooming working in such an inconsistent way:
- Many UI elements (cards in the supply, log, VP counter, button labels...) keep a constant pixel size, so shrink with the higher dpi.
- Other UI elements (cards you play, button borders) keep a constant absolute size, so grow enormous. This is especially jarring on buttons, which grow huge with minuscule text
- certain areas (log) are fixed w.r.t. the view port. So you cannot just zoom and pan, but a certain part of the screen is always taken up with these elements. On the after game results page, both the log and game options are fixed, and the font in the actual game results column in the middle is so large that the scores are cut off, with no way of zooming, panning, or otherwise making them visible.

I don't expect the game to be playable on a phone, but I would fix this from an engineering point of view. Who knows how soon 8K displays become available...

[Username deleted]

Yes, I'm in a game with Username deleted right now as well. He's literally boasting that he's a famous troll.

So, besides a blacklisting feature, is there a way to report a user so they get banned? He'll just make a new user name, but at least he won't be able to build a ranking based on people quitting in frustration.

Yes. Some people will paw through their discard pile constantly if allowed.

That makes total sense. If you were allowed to inspect the cards in your discard pile, it would eliminate most of the need for deck tracking in order to remember how many of your key cards remain in your deck. If only counting was allowed, we would constantly have to ask people to turn the discard pile face down before counting it.

But as you are replying, could you comment on the original point: Could we have a card count as this reason does not apply online; do you consider keeping the rules identical between tabletop and online most important, even though this means that less information is in fact available online as we don't get to estimate pile size; or should the experience be as similar as possible, which would mean providing some way to estimate the size of the discard pile in the online version?

Personally, I would prefer the counter (it changes the rules, but not in spirit), which would also be easy to implement, but would also be happy with a way to estimate pile sizes.

Hi Ingix,

I totally agree with you, this has absolutely low priority. I'm content if this goes to the bottom of the backlog, I just wanted to record it when it occured to me. I agree I'm creating some effort with even this, but I think that is still acceptable.

My top priorities would be getting all the cards working, and fixing the most pressing UX problems (journey token, display of durations/tavern mat). But that has already been requested many times and is hopefully high on the backlog already.

Is it to prevent slowing the game down at the table? (if so this certainly doesn't apply here)

If that was the case, counting the deck (draw pile) should also be prohibited - but this is explicitly allowed.

Also, Donald X. should not have made Philosopher's Stone then. ;-)

This is definitely a low priority topic, but would it be possible to provide a visual cue concerning the size of the discard pile?

I am aware that the rules say "A player is allowed to count how many cards are left in his Deck, but not in his Discard pile.", so I understand that the current implementation reflects that and having a counter as on the deck would be in violation of the rules. I have to admit I don't fully understand the motivation for the rule - I found a comment on f.ds that this was because counting the cards would lead to examining them, as they are face up, which is irrelevant online as the game does the counting; and the information might be critical at the end of a Gardens game, which is rendered moot by the VP counter. If there is no other motivation, I don't think a counter on the discard pile would hurt, but I don't want to start another rules discussion if that would be considered variant territory.

However, in a real-life game you do have a feel for the size of the discard pile. Visual inspection allows you to distinguish whether you have 1 card, 10 cards, 20 cards, or 30 cards in there. So having a visual indication of approximate discard pile size would in fact make the online experience more similar to the tabletop game, if that is the primary goal. You might argue that a competent player should have an idea whether there are 5 or 30 cards in the pile, which is certainly true, but having no information on this at all is still quite different from real life and does not feel intuitive. E.g. in one game with heavy Forager trashing, I overtrashed in a way that I don't think would have happened to me with physical cards.

If a counter is not acceptable, and visually indicating stack size is too complicated to implement, maybe an approximate counter in steps of 5 or 10 would be acceptable? That would be something completely new, though.

This may be more of a feature request than a bug, but...

So, I was playing this totally awesome tomb of the rat fortress game. My opponent had missed the combo, so I ended up spamming 20 Rats per round. Most of the time, the Rats automatically picked a Fortress as my only non-Rats card in hand... but then I had to click in the log in order to decide whether I wanted the VP token from Tomb first, or to get the Fortress back in hand first. Which turned an awesome victory into something of a chore.

I cannot imagine any scenario in which the order in which these two events are resolved matters, at least given the current set of expansions - or am I missing something? Nothing I know interacts immediately with the gaining of VP tokens. So couldn't you add a flag (that you could remove if the need ever arises) that tells you that it is always safe to resolve this event before other events? Probably goes for gaining coin tokens too.

More generally, you could have a mechanism that when resolving events in any order leads to the same result, they are resolved automatically - but that would be more difficult to implement.

Same for me.

I know this particular screen has been much discussed already, but:

Putting 'keep' and 'exchange' under the respective card image instead of on the side would be much more intuitive. Coloring / greying out the images is already pretty intuitive, so moving the buttons to the images would help to reduce the confusion about which button is selected.

I think the option to mark a table as private should be fairly simple to implement, but would eliminate all the tables intended for bot games, play with friends, or otherwise just sitting around.

Alternatively, make all tables private by default, and give the host a button to publish it.

Similar to the way you join as a spectator and have to press 'play', you could also give the host a 'play' button to go from setting up the table to play mode, that would at least eliminate the problem of creating a table and then going away.

To begin with, just hitting 'good match' usually works for me. Going from isotropic to Goko, finding a game to join was the most painful change, so it's good that there already is an 'I just want to play' option.

It would be nice to have a bit more control over the matching process. Just as in setting up a kingdom, you might want to specify some properties of the game you would like to play. In a way, you can already do this by setting up a table, so integrating tables with automatching (i.e. clicking good match sends you to an open place at a table) could work. However, then there would have to be a button 'looking for automatch' at the table so you don't get sent to 'inactive' tables.

But that would still require you to either set up a table and wait, or to get sent to a table without any control. Potentially, two players who both want to e.g. play 'a Prosperity game' would then be sitting at separate tables, waiting. So the nicest thing would be to be able to specify constraints (the UI could even be the same as for setting up a table) and then be automatched based on them. So the two 'Prosperity' players would be matched instead of both waiting at a table. With the 'familiar cards' list you may potentially already have similar logic working in the background that could be extended in this direction. 

Going into a completely different direction, all players that currently are on the 'matching' page could be listed ('isotropic-style') so that you can suggest matches with specific people. I know that you see your friends' tables, but I don't add everybody with whom I have had a nice match to my friend list, yet might still want to play with them again when I happen to see them in the lobby.

+1

Ah, thanks, I had missed that.

Additional idea:

Ability to save and load kingdoms. Optionally: At the end of a game, when the score is displayed, allow saving the kingdom after the fact (when a randomly generated kingdom turns out absolutely awesome, or if you want to replay it later to analyze where you went wrong).

[Basic Ideas]

I have a couple of suggestions concerning the interface for selecting kingdom cards.

Basic Ideas

• Sort order: After some recent update, the cards are sorted alphabetically by expansion, which is already an improvement. However, this can make setting up a specific kingdom a pain, as it requires remembering which specific expansion each card comes from (which even as an experienced player I don't always do for the less thematic ones). Even if you remember the expansion, you have to spot it in the list first, as there is no visual cue where one edition ends and another starts.
  
  As a default, I would simply sort all cards alphabetically. If you want to focus on a specific expansion, you can still do this by restricting the selected expansions on the right.
  
• To improve this further, simply make the sort order selectable:
  
  
  
  • alphabetically
  • by expansion, then alphabetically [current behavior]
  • by card cost, alphabetically
• 
  You might also offer filters, not for restricting which cards can be used, but to reduce the list that is shown to facilitate selection:
  
  
  
  • card type ('I want two attacks')
  • card class (gainers, villages, trashers, cursers...)
  • expansion ('now I pick four alchemy cards')
  • cost type (potion/debt)
  • ...

Advanced Ideas

• Allow more control over the random kingdom generation. If you don't know it, Jack of all Dominion is my favorite among all the many Dominion card selector apps for Android, and showcases all the options one could wish for:
  
  
  
  • require (with at least n cards) / exclude expansion
  • require (with at least n cards) / exclude card type
  • require (with at least n cards) / exclude card class (cantrip, village, gainer, trasher, curser, coins, VP tokens, debt cost...)
  • special rules, e.g. Alchemy rule: no or at least n potion cost cards
  • use only events / only landmarks
• 
  Allow preview of randomly generated kingdoms, with the option to regenerate.
  
• 
  Taking this one step further, allow generating a kingdom and then editing it. Sometimes I don't want to make any or at least not all of the choices, but then see a kingdom where I would like to replace a specific card, either because I think that would make the board more fun, or because a card clashes with the rest of the board (e.g. Wolf Den + Prizes/Castles/Knights) so that nobody will buy it anyway.