how to limit kingdom card options ? ...

[crispyP]

i went to the familiar cards tab and highlighted the cards from a couple sets that i wanted to include in the drawing pool for kingdom cards....  but when i play a game against a bot i keep getting cards in the kingdom that i did not highlight and did not want in my kingdom.

is there a way to limit which cards can be chosen for the kingdom so i dont end up with cards i dont like in there?

[Ingix]

That sounds strange, that feature works for me.

There are 3 things that might be the problem

1) There are 10 cards from the base set that you cannot "unfamiliarize" yourself with: Chapel, Festival, Gardens, Laboratory, Market, Moneylender, Smithy, Village, Witch and Workshop.

At the start of this Online implementation the developer found that too many players couldn't play any game because by mistake they made themselves unfamiliar with all or almost all cards, so less than 10 remained.

If the cards you don't want are from those 10 cards, that would explain the behavior, and unfortunately there is nothing you can do (I'm not sure if changing the above behavior of the 10 cards would help now overall).

2) If you create a manual table, or maybe you end up on such a table after playing against a human opponent, then the table option "Respect familiar cards" may not be set. You can set it by going into "Edit Otpions" in the end-of-game screen, then "Advanced Options". If there is no checkmark besides "Respect Familiar cards", click the box so it contains a checkmark. Then familiar cards should work.

3) In the "Options" tab, there is a setting "Max unfamiliar cards". If the value there is greater than 0, (2 is the default, I think) then you allowed the game to put at max that number of unfamiliar cards into your kingdom. Set this value to 0 and it will not do this any more.

[demiurge]

Newb here, what does the cardlists tab do? What does banned list do?

[Ingix]

When the cards to be used in a Kingdom are randomly determined, initially all the cards had the same probability to come up. Think about it as all the randomizers (physical cards with a blue instead of a grey background border) shuffled together, then you drawing the 10 Kingdom cards.

If you put a card on the "Cards you like" list, it works like you put a second randomizer of that card into your randomizer deck. It means it's now (roughly) twice as likely to be drawn for the Kingdom as before.

If you put a card on the "Banned list", it's removed from the randomizer deck alltogether, so it can't come up.

If you put a card on the "Cards you dislike" list, it will now be drawn only (roughly) half as likely as normal (the phyical cards analogy breaks down a bit here).

This is done for all players, and then the Kingdom is determined, with all adjustement from all players taken into account.

That means if you really do not want to play a certain card (some players feel strongly against Possession, Swindler or Rebuild, for example), you don't need to. If you really like some cards, you can make them come up more often. If you don't like a card, but don't want to ban it outright, you can make sure you see it less often, by putting it onto the "Cards you dislike" list.

[demiurge]

I play the lord Rattington and put Chapel on the banned list. Chapel still comes up. What gives?

[Ingix]

I personally feal that shouldn't happen, but is in the way it was programmed:

An automatched game that doesn't use expansions will ignore all lists. The rationale here is that we want to increase the fun for players as much as possible, while still not allowing/forcing them to game the system too much.

It makes sense that if you and your opponent only have the base game, then each player able to ban 5 cards from 26 has a much bigger effect than if the card pool contains > 100 cards.

OTOH, I understand that this restriction makes no sense in a game where all your opponents are bots. If you don't want to see Chapel, you shouldn't have to.

1) I'll ask if this can be changed for bot games.
2) For the moment, you can just start your own table:
      Click on "New Table", then "Create Table". Then click on "Add bot" to add one bot. If you want to play more bots, you need to increase the maximum player number first. Then click "Ready" and your game will start, respecting your banned and disliked card lists. If you want it to respect your liked list as well, then you need to go into the "Advanced Options" and put a checkmark on the firt checkbox in the card list row.

[demiurge]

oh okay. I was going to buy the expansions when Menagerie comes out but if I can't ban chapel, it would make me think again about buying.

[Ingix]

Once you have a subscription, any game you play will no longer be a base-only game, so the restriction I mentioned is not in effect. You can ban Chapel, then, if you want to.