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I would really like to agree with you, but I'm pretty sure there's some edge case where you want to call Coins in the middle of a chain -- say you play Storyteller and you want to play Diadem with it, and calling Coins earlier on in the chain gives you more Actions so you can draw more cards. It's less difficult to come up with an example for Royal Carriage.

I remember thinking about this at length when MF was pushing out Adventures. There's not really a good way to make an interface that offers you all available legal options when theres a Throne Room chain (or similar) and you have one of these cards on the mat. It's really unfortunate but I think that's the way it is.

That said, this is not a reason to make the interface suffer for the other 95% of games. It should be fluid, seamless, and intuitive.

I'm surprised many people seem to think saying gg counts as being douchy. I try to say it after every game because I thought it was considered polite. Also because at the end of every game my browser freezes for a short while while it reveals all of the log details I try to say it just before I end the game otherwise people tend to leave before I get to say anything or respond to their gg and I figured not being seen to say anything made me look rude.

Should I not be doing this?

There is nothing you can do that will please everyone on this front -- someone will manage to find what you do rude.

My solution is "you do you bae"

Sometimes I feel like typing gg, sometimes I don't. I just like to let the universe decide.

Uh oh, I have Icehawk's mod installed, that could be it. Whoops  :-[

When I finish a game and want to start another quick game against a bot or whatever, I go to click on the Ready button and then I'm sniped! The Repeat Kingdom button, which doesn't appear right away, suddenly shows up and it's right where the Ready button used to be!

Obviously this is not what I want and should be fixed.

While this optional-button is probably not a great idea for Vassal (you almost always want to play it, so having to explicitly decline when you don't should be ok), there isn't really a bug either.

After playing a couple hundred games and talking to several people, there's a piece of feedback I have related to this. It's kind of a slight reversal on a couple of things I've said, maybe. I'm not going to bother checking all of my posts here though.

There are some cards like Plaza or Mill that give you vanilla bonuses, then "you may do a thing". You can do the thing, or you can continue on with your turn. Some cards are like Plaza where you can just continue clicking on cards to go on with your turn. You have to opt-in to doing the thing. Other cards are like Mill where you have to click a button to continue with your turn. You have to opt-out of doing the thing.

In the case of Plaza and Mill, it makes slightly more sense to have it the other way around, since now there's this confusion with Mill: the next card I clicked was an Action -- what did the user intend to do: discard it or play it? With Plaza, if the next card clicked is an Action, the user probably wanted to play it. If he wanted to just play a Copper next without discarding, you would need the End Actions button for that anyways.

The point I'm trying to make here is that this kind of thing should be consistent across all cards. It shouldn't be the case that I have to opt-in to some cards and opt-out of others. It should always be the same, it's going to make for the best UI.

My preference would be to opt-in to everything, then have the client decide when it needs to stop me (for example I Throne-Roomed a Plaza, so yes I have to opt-out of that no matter what). But really the most important thing is that it's consistent for all cards. The design decision to make here is: what makes sense most of the time, across all cards and possible interactions? The UI should go with that and then figure out when it can't.

TBH this design decision should have been made a year ago and judging by the current state of the UI, it hasn't even been thought of until now. Better late than never, I guess...

I cannot fathom how a first turn would ever require four minutes

It all depends on how deep you think. Think about chess (or go), if you only think ahead one half movement, you won't ever think more than a few seconds or minutes. However, if you think ahead many turns, you will take much longer. (For Dominion, I haven't gotten that far. I only play more or less intuitively and thus quite fast).

To be clear, my position is thinking about the entire game, through end-game exceptionally thoroughly still should take far LESS than four minutes and likely less than three on the first turn.

Dude, this is exceptionally narrow-minded. After some people, including the designer of the game, have told you that it sometimes takes more than 4 minutes without any kind of slow playing, you're still holding onto this assertion that it should always take less. That is ridiculous, you can't possibly speak for everyone who could possibly play the game.

Now that this is being linked from the client, it would be nice to clean this up, maybe make it more "official." Some ideas:

1. Make this something more professional-looking than a forum post. One that ideally will be maintained by someone in an official capacity. Notably, there was an update today and this wasn't updated along with it (it's still a week old).

2. Table of Contents, FAQ section: section headers aren't that helpful and it's hard to know what's in here without reading a wall of text. Section headers should be complete sentences so that people can look over only those (ideally with links to more detail) and know exactly what's there.

3. Known issues: it would be great if people could come here and see a list of the things that are known to be problems. If there are workarounds for them, they should be detailed and extremely easy to access. If these features are planned for a future release, that should be easy to find out.

4. There needs to be something very visible to tell users how to get their questions answered if they don't see it here. Contact E-mails that don't require accounts separate from the one people already have to make to play on dominion.games, that they can communicate with would be a big plus.

I appreciate Chris's work in making this, but the software desperately needs something user-friendly to help first-time players understand what's happening. It's finally time to polish this thing and get it fully ready for the "big time"

People who play slowly, the way to detect that is to average game lengths, for matched-with-strangers games only

I agree with you in theory, but it seems to me that in order for this to actually work, you'd need a HUGE sample size. I'm thinking a few hundred of these games, for this statistic to start being accurate.

Do I have a better idea? Nope, not right now :P

This is a reason why some people would prefer the option to still have a VP counter. It's not a reason to make VPon the only option available. No VP counter should be an option.

And that should be the default option, because that's the way the game designer designed the game and Shuffleit doesn't have the authority to just go rewriting Dominion. Yes, sometimes there are situations that come up in online games that aren't accounted for by the board game rules, where Shuffleit has to do something graceful, but this one is explicitly spelled out in the rulebook what should happen. The fact that they're even offering a VPon option is questionable enough, but probably fine.

There are plenty of reasons why the first turn of the game should take longer than 4 minutes that aren't just abuse. The current timer isn't generous enough IMHO.

If you honestly feel that way, that nobody could possibly want that much time on any turn, ever; I would encourage you to slow down your play and think critically about more of the actions you take. I imagine you would get much better at the game, it worked that way for me.

And if you don't want to do that, or you try it and see no benefit, then the answer for you is to blacklist people who don't play fast enough for you. The answer is not to impose a time limit that would restrict people like me who sometimes want to be more deliberate at certain points in the game.

It's not like I take 4 minutes to make every single decision in the game, but sometimes I want to stop and think carefully about something and yes, it can take longer than 4 minutes.

It can happen with Pirate Ship too, Both players trash down to a deck with no treasures, but that can play multiple Pirate Ships per turn. They also don't have enough tokens to do anything meaningful. This one requires a lot more to get to this situation and Pirate Ship usually isn't that good of a card, so I've never seen this one happen before. It's probably on the same level as the "Chapel your whole deck and Coppers and Curses are empty" or the "Donate all economy and still have debt" where they only happen if all of the players misplay horribly and/or decide they want it to happen for the lolz.

In any case, it would be nice for the software to have a graceful way of handling these situations. I always thought DXV's ruling of starving to death was a joke because it's a board game -- it's obvious what you do when you can't do anything anymore, you stop playing. To a computer, though, it's not obvious. In fact, it's impossible to make a computer program that can tell you that you're in this situation (I believe this is a form of the Halting Problem if I remember this correctly).

Often Possession games will become degenerate. Possession is the only card where I've ever seen a degenerate game arise because of all players trying to pursue the best strategy. Still, it's pretty rare.

But regardless of how rare these situations are, there should be some resolution to it within the game. It could be considered a flaw in the game that in these situations you are supposed to play until you starve to death. Most reasonable people would choose something not in the rule book like agreeing to a draw. I think for an online game there should be a better solution (but I also think for a tabletop game there should be a better solution). Currently you're just sitting there slowplaying, trying to last until your opponent times out, which is pretty bad.

I feel pretty strongly that if any type of reputation system is going to exist, that it's not officially supported. There are all kinds of problems that can come of it and I think it's best for Shuffleit to not get involved. Their role is to take care of people who are clearly abusing their system, not to collect and organize the subjective thoughts of the people who use their software for a popularity contest.

There are a lot of other online games out there; none of the real, legitimate ones officially support this kind of thing.

I feel like maybe the number of friends someone has could be visible? *maybe* that's non-controversial enough to be OK officially supporting it? I feel like anything that is officially recorded has to be completely positive and have no negative connotation whatsoever -- you start a zero when you make a new account and it can only go up from there. Anything negative and you start getting into group blacklists which is a really ugly topic and one I feel like the official product should stay away from.

Even something as simple as disconnect-percentage potentially leads to problems. Let's say I buy a year's subscription, but I have crappy internet so I disconnect a lot. 6 months later I improve my internet subscription, but I have this high disconnect% so nobody wants to play with me. So I can either start a new account to get rid of my disconnect% and give up 6 months of my subscription, or deal with whatever consequences a high disconnect% has.

I said this before but it seems like it bears repeating.

"Take some time and get used to it" is not a permanent fix for this. Maybe it's not the highest priority thing ever, but the implementation for this needs to change at some point. Any interface that's causing this much confusion needs to be changed at some point.

I understand that some things are difficult to make an intuitive interface for. On the other hand, just having text that says "journey token face up" or "journey token face down" would be way, way better than the current thing. So I don't think an argument like that can be made for the journey token.

I'm hoping/guessing that an automatically opening message about familiar cards will have an effect similar to your suggestion of a splash screen.
Maybe it wasn't clear that I wasn't talking about user-to-user messages, but (for now) only system-to-user messages.

Yes, this would solve the issue. I think it's a needed part of whatever final "first-game experience" you present to new users.

User-to-user messages are still extremely important, though.

Oh and please keep it friendly.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, I'm not being sarcastic here. I re-read every post I've made in the past month and haven't found a single thing I've said that wasn't 100% friendly to you or anyone else. Please elaborate.