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"intention" is not really what matters. As you say, the card text is relatively clear. You play an Estate and not a Border Guard, so it doesn't reveal 3 cards.

An Inherited Border Guard should reveal 3 cards when you have the Lantern.

It's true that you play an Estate, not a Border Guard. But Donald has ruled that Lantern actually changes the on-play ability of all your Border Guards. This includes the Border Guard that you set aside with Inheritance, which all your Estates are copying. (This is different from Horn, which just tells you what happens when you discard a Border Guard.)

I think you too have missed the point of Dominion.

Maybe you missed the point of my post.

Regarding your explanation of risk management, I was saying the same thing. ("The luck factor is just part of the basic structure of the game though.")

I definitely agree that the biggest element of luck is which cards get bottom-decked (along with the opening split). There is no risk management involved in that particular element though. There is with buying two terminals, but that's a separate issue. You seem to be confusing the two.

To your bigger point that the "point" of Dominion is that it's short so therefore the large luck factor is good. I agree that Dominion works because it's short, but that's because luck-based games are better if they are short, not because short games are better of they have a big luck factor. We can imagine a game that is just as short but with a lower luck factor. Everything else being equal, why wouldn't that be a better game?

(Another thing is that Dominion with 4 players, the most luck-based format, can easily take an hour, and sometimes more. I can play 4-player Puerto Rico in pretty close to that time. This is why many high-level players only want to play 2-player of course.)

Of course party/casual games are supposed to have a big luck factor and also be short. And there are good arguments to be made that Dominion was not originally meant to be played on quite as serious a level as some people are. (There was a thread about this in the strategy forum a while ago.) Maybe you're saying that we should be playing Dominion as more of a casual game than a skill-based game. I do suspect that a lot of frustration comes from this partial mismatch. A leaderboard, tournaments, strategy guides, etc, don't exactly invite to that kind of thinking though.

This list might be easier to use: http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Card_list

Yes. When-gain abilities trigger right after you gain a card. At that moment you can reveal a Watchtower you have in your hand to move that card. (You could instead use for instance Cargo Ship, Royal Seal or Innovation to moved the gained card.)

You're making a good case, but unfortunately I think the developer is not interested in fixing the myriad UI issues to make them more intuitive and understandable for newcomers. Actually I'm not a newcomer and I still make mistakes because the "play treasures" button suddenly changes to a "don't play treasures" button in the same place and looking exactly the same, etc.

I made this post almost a year ago about one aspect of these inconsistencies: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=2936.msg13190#msg13190
Unfortunately this bad practice instead continued when new cards were implemented. The UI choices are always to the benefit of reducing the amount of clicks instead of making it intuitive. (Of course many improvement could be made even without increasing the amount of clicks.)

I really see this as a grave failing of the implementation that should have been taken care of very early. The most important thing is to make the interface welcoming and intuitive, especially for new players. That way you get a stable user base and the finances to keep developing - and hiring more people as needed.

This is correct. The Watchtower reacts because it's in your hand right after you gained a card (itself). This has nothing to do with lose-track but with a peculiar timing rule in Dominion.

The old bug is a bug because a Rats can be trashed even though it's already moved to the trash, which should mean that it's lost track of.

Can someone give me a few examples of situations where it takes more than 2 minutes to make a decision?

But you already asked that before, and I gave you an answer: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=3034.msg13453#msg13453

2 minutes is definitely too short on certain turns. To be clear: It's much more than enough on the vast majority of turns. But it's too short on certain turns that happen often enough.

What's needed is logging how much time a player uses per click. Usually you very rarely need to take a long time between each click. What you sometimes need is to take a break once in your turn (usually after drawing), and then decide what to do the rest of the turn. A player taking close to max time for each click should not be very hard to detect, and if performed several times, should give the other player the option for force resign them.

3. Actually write some code to detect people that are slow playing on a regular basis and ban them.  This isn't rocket science folks!

Definitely this should be possible. We were musing about it here: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=19445.msg789268#msg789268

[Exactly]

The important thing to realize is that when a card doesn't specify a cost type, it means 0 of that cost type.
Familiar costs [3$ 1p]. Imp costs [2$ 0p]. So Imp costs less than Familiar. Village costs [3$ 0p], which is also less than Familiar (since 0p is less than 1p). Exactly 1$ more than [3$ 1p] is [4$ 1p], so Familiar can be Upgraded into Golem. But exactly 1$ more than [3$ 0p] is [4$ 0p], so Village cannot be Upgraded into Golem. This last part is what you probably have misunderstood (or misremember) to mean that coins and Potions are "completely separate".

The cost of Imp doesn't really include the *, that's just a reminder. So you can Remodel an Imp into a card that costs $0, $1, $2, $3 or $4.

Here's a bug that I forgot to report when I was doing all this research.

If you Inherit a card like Embargo, Feast, Death Cart, Mining Village, etc, and play it, it's not an Action card anymore. But Donald's current (maybe tentative) ruling is that this still counted as playing an Action card. This means that you can call Coin of the Realm, and it means that Citadel tries to replay it. I think it's fairly obvious that it's also what would seem most intuitive for most players.

It seems it works this way with Citadel (I tested with Embargo, Death Cart, Experiment and Mining Village), but not with Coin of the Realm. So Citadel replays the card, but it's an Estate so nothing happens. Nevertheless, this means that the next card I play will not be replayed by Citadel, so it makes a difference. But I don't get an option to call Coin of the Realm.

At least it should work the same with Citadel and Coin of the Realm: Either the client counts it as playing and Action card or it doesn't.

Since almost none of this was added to the known card bugs, I'm wondering how much of it has been fixed. It seems like some stuff was fixed while I was still checking (as noted above). But I have no idea about the rest. Any chance of getting some information about this?

This is not supposed to be a bug, but in this game it was: 23603229
None of us got a prompt to trash BoM for $2 when we played it as a Mining Village. This happened several times during the game.

[Complete Rules for Dominion and All Its Expansions]

I finally finished the new version, which incorporates the new expansion, Renaissance, as well as containing many other fixes and improvements.

Complete Rules for Dominion and All Its Expansions

For completeness I'm reporting this bug. I'm not going to say that this needs be fixed (certainly not with a high priority), but it's not correct, so I'm reporting it, as accurately as I can.

There are some triggered abilities that affect "each other player". They are:
when-gain: Embassy, Haunted Castle, Ill-Gotten Gains, Lost City
when-buy: Messenger, Noble Brigand

When you trigger those, you get to order them with any other ability that trigger at the same time. For instance if you buy Noble Brigand with an Embargo token on the pile, you decide which to do first.

Currently this seems to works correctly with Haunted Castle, Messenger and Noble Brigand, but not with the others. It's probably because when you resolve these three cards, you also have to do something. For the others (Embassy, Ill-Gotten Gains and Lost City), only the other players do something. But they should all work the same; you should be able to use Watchtower or Innovation etc. before or after the other players are affected. Currently you only get the option before.

So these abilities are probably designated in the client as only "belonging" to the other players and therefore are automatically resolved after "your" abilities. Every ability has to "belong" to one player though, in terms of figuring out the timing. (First the active player does all his abilities, ordering them, then the next player, etc.) I don't think it's possible with current cards that two of these abilities can trigger at the same time. If there were it would create a problem in the client, because there would be nobody to decide which to resolve first. For instance if you gain Embassy and also have a theoretical "While this is in play, when you gain a card, each other player gains a Curse". In this case it becomes obvious that the active player has to decide.