Welcome to the Menagerie preview week March 2nd - 8th

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Ingix

Donald X. will preview a few cards of the upcoming Menagerie expansion each day from Monday, March 2nd to Friday, March 6th. Hopfeully shortly after the preview each day, you will be able to play with the previewed cards for the next (roughly) 24h.

This thread will contain Dominion Online specific things you need to know to play with the previewed cards  It's a companion series to the preview articles and will be published shortly after the preview for the day goes up. The table of contents will be expanded each day.

If you have questions or comments, just post them in this thread!

How playing with previewed cards works
Changes to effect selection, Kingdom selector card order, new options
Day 1: Snowy Village, Sheepdog, Animal Fair, Kiln and Barge
Day 2: Supplies, Scrap and Livery
Day 3: Bounty Hunter, Stockpile, Coven and the Exile mat
Day 4: Way of the Ox / Mole / Turtle and Toil, Commerce, Populate
Day 5: Mastermind, Black Cat and Wayfarer
Weekend: No new cards online, but you can still play with the previewed cards

first article in series

Ingix

#1
During the preview week, which will last from Monday, March 2nd up to Sunday, March 8th, there will be options to start a preview game, in addition to playing "normally", as you are used to.

In the "Matching" tab will be buttons to start 2 player unrated preview games vs. another player ("Menagerie Previews") and vs. a bot ("Preview vs. bot").

If you start a table, you can select "Menagerie Preview" under "Advanced Options". This allows you to costumize your game as usual, like whom you play with and other options. You can also select (non-preview) cards to be used.

The format of a preview game is a little bit different each day. There will usually be some number of cards randomly taken from the previews in the days before and some number of cards randomly taken from the preview of the day. Additional rules may apply to landscapes, once they have been previewed.

The exact format for each day will be given at the start of the article for that day. Any cards/landscapes not determined by the preview will come from the pool of cards subscribed to by either player, same as for other games.


Ingix

Some changes/additions have been made to the general UI, and a new option and a new autoplay exist.

Pawn, Courtier and Trusty Steed

If you play Pawn, a card that lets you choose 2 from 4 effects, the interface will now look like the picture to the left. You can select 2 of the four buttons to choose the pair of effects you want. If you choose +1 Card and +1 Coin, you come to the picture on the right:

     

The selected effects are now in white and since you reached the necessary 2 effects, the other buttons are 'dark' and you can confirm your selection by pressing "Done Choosing". Of course, you can change your decision simply by clicking on a selected button, which will unselect it and you can then choose another effect.

Note that the most common choice for Pawn is still reachable by one click on the "Card & Action" button.

Courtier and Trusty Steed, 2 cards that also let you choose some effects from a list given on the card, have been similiarly changed. Trusty Steed also has the "Cards & Actions" button to get the most often used combination fast.

If you want to know why that change happened, come back on day 2!

Kingdom selector

In the Kingdom Selector, where you can choose which cards you want to appear in the Kingdom for your own table, the order cards appear in has been changed. Cards are no longer sorted by expansion, but simply sorted alphabetically according to your chosen language. That means you can now find a card like Hermit, for which I always forget the expansion it belongs to, by simply scrolling down and finding it where the other cards starting with "H" are, together with his friends the Herald and the Herbalist:



If you are used to scrolling down the big list of all cards to find all cards from Intrigue or Seaside, for example, this can still be done. Click on the left side of the screen on then button with the expansion you are looking for, and you will only be shown cards from that expansion:



Options, Autoplay

There is a new option:



Don't bother with it now, all will become clear (or opaque, depending on your choice) once Ways are previewed.

There is also a new autoplay. It's for Trader and you'll probably never need to touch it, maybe once in a blue moon, on a February 29th:



This is the default and was the way the game client worked until now: If you gain a Silver to your discard pile and have a Trader in hand, it will not ask you if you want to use the Trader. If you set this to "off", it will ask.


Ingix

The preview for today can be found here!

Format for preview games: 2 randomly chosen cards from today's preview.

If you haven't yet, click the link above and read all about those 5 cards. For the game interface, most are straightforward, but be sure to read up on Animal Fair below, to not get a nasty surprise.

If you have Villagers, then Snowy Village will ask if you want to convert them to Actions right now, before they become useless for the turn. It will default to zero, so if you don't want to convert any, just click on the "Villager"-button and the game continues.

Animal Fair is the first card that can be bought with an alternate cost of trashing an Action card from your hand, though it still uses up one Buy to do so.

If you do not have an Action card in hand when you click on Animal Fair, everything works as before: You will pay $ for the card, as usual, and Autobuy works as always.

If you have generated $7 and have one (or more) Action card in hand when you buy Animal Fair, the game will ask if you want to pay with $ or by trashing an Action card:



If you want to pay with $, click on the "Don't trash" button. If you want to pay by trashing an Action card, just click on the one you want trashed. Note that even though you have enough $ to pay for the Animal Fair, it may still be a reasonable strategic choice to trash an Action card for Animal Fair, so you can for example use that $ for another buy you may have, like in this pictured example.

However, if you have an Action card in hand but do not have generated $7 yet (as shown in the status bar),  the game will asume you want to trash an Action card to pay for Animal Fair, even if you could generate $7 by the Treasures you have in hand.

The following is the same situation as above, you just clicked on Animal Fair to buy it before you played your Treasures:



Note that there is no "Don't trash" button, the only question is which Action card to trash. If you have only one Action card in hand, it will be trashed outright. So be sure to generate the $7 (or whatever Animal Fair may cost at a given moment) from your Treasures before you click on the Animal Fair to buy it, if you want to pay by $.



Ingix

#4
The preview for today can be found here!

Format for preview games: 2 randomly chosen cards from yesterday's preview and 1 random card from today's preview.

Today it's (almost) all about Horses.

Supplies is a Treasure that gives you a Horse, even to the top of your deck. It's not included in the game's autoplay, because maybe sometimes you don't want a Horse.

Scrap uses the new interface for selecting some of a given list of effects. It works as described in the article about the new Pawn interface (and other changes). 


Ingix

The preview for today can be found here!

Format for preview games: 2 randomly chosen cards from day 1 and day 2 previews and 1 random card from today's preview.

Exile

Menagerie has effects that put cards on and remove them from a new mat, the Exile mat (one mat per player). You can view what is on anyone's Exile mat by hovering over (or tapping on, if on mobile) their personal status bar (the one with their name in it). That shows all the cards they have in various zones, now including the Exile mat.

Cards moved from the Supply to a player's Exile mat (as done by Coven) are not gained (so they don't trigger any such effects), but are still belonging to that player, so they count for any VP effects at end of game (negatively, in case of the Curses distributed by Coven).

If you gain a card that you have a copy of on your Exile mat, you can discard all those copies if you want. This effect is optional and you will be shown which card and how many would be discarded:



Here 2 Stockpiles are on your Exile mat and when you buy (or otherwise gain) another one, you can discard them (which means they go to your discard pile).

This discard ability of the Exile mat is also the reason for a new autoplay:



Some cards you normally never want to see in your deck again, once you managed to get them to your Exile mat. Those "bad cards for your deck" are all the pure Victory cards (minus Feodum and Farmland), the Ruins, Copper and Curse. If you gain any of those cards, and you have the autoplay set to "Keep bad cards in Exile", you will not be asked if you want to discard the other copies from your Exile mat. You can change that autoplay option during a game by right-clicking on any of the mentioned cards.

Stockpile will move itself to your Exile mat when played, so you won't see it in play (similar to Spoils). Because of that, it's also not included when you autoplay your Treasures.


Ingix

The preview for today can be found here!

Format for preview games: 3 randomly chosen cards from day 1 to day 3 previews, 1 random Way (Ox, Mole or Turtle) and 1 random Event (Toil, Commerce or Populate) from today's preview.

Be sure to read the preview article linked above, because Ways are something different from what you've seen before (unless you already know a certain red-headed woman that seems to like pigs, the Enchantress).

To follow the interface explanations for now all you need to know is that Way of the Ox is a Way that, when used with an Action card, makes that card do nothing of what it normally does when played, but just makes it give you +2 Actions.

The method Ways work online is that when you can play Actions, each Action card in your hand gets a small button (with the Way's picture) in the middle of the text area. If you click on the card in the area of that button, you play the card using the Way. If you click anywhere else, you play the card "as usual" and don't use the Way.

Here you have 2 Smithies in hand. If you have no other option to get + Actions, the best approach here is to play the first Smithy as Way of the Ox, by cklicking on the button with the Ox picture. This gives you +2 Actions, so you can then play the second Smithy "as usual", drawing 3 cards, and you still have one remaining Action left.



The right image is an alternative way to show the button, where it is mostly transparent and only the blue frame as border between play "as usual" and "using the Way" areas is clearly visible. You can choose whatever option you like better, by going into the game's "Options" tab, scrolling down and setting the option "Transparent Way buttons" to either "No" (left picture) or "Yes" (right picture).

Cards played using a Way will get the picture of the Way, so you are reminded that their normal effects didn't happen ("Where are the coins I got from Militia? Oh, I forgot, I played it using Way of the Ox!").

This interface will probably cover 90% of the time you play an Action card and a Way is in the kingdom. The remaining 10% are made of 2 cases:

1) You play a card from some other place than your hand, so the above button interface couldn't be used.
2) Something "unexpected" happens after you make the choice to use or not use a Way on a given Action card.

Cards not played from your hand

Say you play Throne Room, the card you select to play is chosen from your hand. Clicking inside or ouside the Way button determines how the first playing of that card will happen, but the second playing is independend and needs a new decision for using (or not using) a Way.

In this case, the game asks you to consider the way to play the card.

In the picture below, the Smithy has been played once already "as usual", drawing 3 cards. For the second playing you need to decide if to use the Way of the Ox or not.

If you have no Action cards in hand, using the Way of the Ox wouldn't make much sense, so you can just click the "Play" button and Smithy is played "as usual", drawing 3 more cards.

However, if you have Action cards in hand, it can make sense to play the Smithy using Way of the Ox now. To do this, just click on the "Ox" button.



Something "unexpected" happens after you make the choice

Something that got not mentioned in the preview article is that you are not supposed to decide if to use (or not) a Way until you already played the card and all the "first" effects for it have happened. The most well known ones are the Reactions that react to an attack being played, like Moat.



In this example, you played Sea Hag, a Curse giving card with no further effects for you, in a 3-player game. You want it to Curse your opponents, of course, so decided not to use the Way of the Turtle when you played it. But you had bad luck, both opponents revealed a Moat to that Sea Hag.

So now the game allows you to reconsider what you want to do, at the time that is technically correct. The interface is the same as in the case of a card played that is not in your hand. Now you can click on the "Turtle" button, which makes the Seag Hag not do anything now but it will be replayed during your next turn. Your opponents can't have Moats in hand forever...

Autoplay for "reconsider the Way"

This last behavior also gave rise to a new autoplay:



That's because in addition to your opponent's Reaction cards, some of your own cards/tokens can cause a "first" effect to happen: The +$1, +1 Buy and +1 Action tokens from Adventures, and Champion from the Page traveller line.

Since those are effects from you that come without any surprise (unlike an opponent's Moat, for example), you can take them into account when you make your decision about using/not using a Way on an Action card, so asking you again afterwards is normally pointless. So if you set that autplay option to "Smart reconsider Ways" (which is the default), the game will not ask you again in those cases.

Note that the +1 Card token is missing from the above list, as drawing a card may cause you to actually change your plans. If you draw a card from that token, you'll be asked to "reconsider the Way" always, regardless of how this autoplay is set.

You can change this autoplay in-game by right-clicking on Champion, or any of the cards that move the mentioned tokens: Teacher and the 3 Events Lost Arts, Training and SeaWay.

Kingdom landscape selector

If you are using the Menagerie Preview on your own tables, for today you need to allow at least 2 free landscape slots (not occupied by a specific landscape card), one of which must allow Events. That's true for the default configuration, but if you want Projects and/or Landmarks as well, you must add slots.




After explaining how Ways are used in general, only one Event needs additional explanation:

Populate: If you want, you can click on each Action pile in the Supply once and gain the cards in the order you want to (because the order can matter). When it doesn't matter, just click the "Random Order" button and the game will decide for you.

Day 5: Mastermind, Black Cat and Wayfarer]next article in series [/iurl]

Ingix

Quote from: jeebus on 06 March 2020, 12:34:17 AM

So to me Champion would also trigger when you play an Action card, but give you +1 Action after you resolve the played card. (Sauna and Merchant would work the same way.) I said the same thing here. So no matter if the +1 Action happened "first" or "after", it would not trigger on its own playing. (But note that it does make a difference when playing a Storyteller that plays a Diadem, and when playing a Snowy Village.)

But I think it is established that because Reaction cards exist that are hidden in a player's hand, the game cannot go by the "an effect must have been present at the time of the event in order to trigger" paradigm, because no other player can verify if a given Reaction card was already present in a player's hand at trigger time (Secret Chamber finding Moat example).

So it adopted an "as long as triggers for an event haven't been handled completely and are over, new relevant trigger effects appearing will also trigger" approach . This leads to a Hireling double played by Ghost at start of turn actually giving you twice +1 card that same turn.

So that would mean the "For the rest of the game" ability appearing during Champion's playing is existing and relevant at the time 'normal' "When you play an Actions card" triggers are checked at the end of Champion's resolution.

Ingix

#8
The preview for today is here!

Format for preview games: 2 randomly chosen cards from day 1 to day 3 previews (they are all Kingdom cards), 1 random landscape from day 4 preview and one random card from today's preview.

If you play Wayfarer and wonder how to actually gain the Silver: Just click on it in the Supply.

If you have more than 1 Mastermind effect at the start of your turn, you will always be presented with a Mastermind button with a number of outstanding Mastermind effects for the turn. That helps you understand what options you have.

If you don't want to use Mastermind effect any more (say the only cards left in your hand are a Remake and 2 Colonies), just click on the Mastermind button, then choose "Don't Mastermind".


Ingix

Preview week is (almost) over. While no new cards will be added for play to Dominion Online after Friday, on Saturday and Sunday you can have preview games with a mix of all the previewed cards.

The switch from Friday to weekend preview games is planned at around Saturday, 9AM UTC.

Format for preview games Saturday/Sunday: Kingdom cards: 3 randomly chosen cards from the preview days 1, 2, 3 and 5; Landscapes: 1 random landscape from day 4.