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Having the option would be better than not having the option, I don't dispute that.

The thing is, it's a variant. If you add in this variant, why not add in the next variant? You could spend all day doing this and the devs have better things to do. Maybe they could charge money for them but I certainly wouldn't pay for that.

I had suggested somewhere else that it could be done in a mod or some kind of extension. I think that's a great idea. But if I'm subscribing to this service, I'd rather the devs work on every possible tweak and optimization to the game as the designer intended rather than worry about which variants are going to get worked on.

I guess by this same logic VP counter shouldn't be implemented, and yeah I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it was. I can't really defend that, but this rationale is why I don't think it's a good idea for this option to be part of the official product.

I've mentioned this before:

what Hamlet does in the interface doesn't match what the card actually does. The problem here is that someone who isn't intimately familiar with Dominion is going to read the card and think something like this.

Play Hamlet. OK I got my card and action. What is next?

You may discard a card for +1 Action. OK I'll do that. Discard for an Action, I press that button, now I discard for and Action. Now what's next?

You may discard a card for +1 Buy. OK I'll do that. Wait, why can't I do that?

The answer is because you needed to click "discard for both" at the very start. Yeah I get this might be the best interface for overall click efficiency but man that does not matter in the slightest. People who care about this kind of thing will get used to whatever interface there is while people who are learning the client will be really turned off by it. Undo is nice but the interface should be intuitive and work the first time.

If there's a way to have the default case be to not discard anything (with a passive prompt that lets you discard if you want) and also have the prompts actually line up with what's on the card, then yeah that's totally what should be done -- and I think there is. If you discard for an Action then when you're done you should still get the option to discard for a buy. And sure you can leave the "both" button up there, it's not hurting anything (if you click Both and decide against discarding for a Buy you should be able to do that too).

But the Making Fun interface, as much as it encouraged some misclicks, was better than what there is currently, because at least it did what the card said to do and it made sense to everyone what was going on.

I guess the VP counter doesn't count as a variant because it's technically possible to count it yourself

VP counter is a variant. By the rules of the game you're not allowed to use any external sources to track information about the game. The reason they have implemented it would be because it's such a popular variant, I guess.

The default setting for VP counter should be off, and it should always be disabled 100% of the time no matter what in games with more than 2 players and Masquerade, regardless of the preferences of individual players.

I believe, no really, that overall people would have less fun if this were implemented. You personally might have more fun, but well, I have to look at the big picture.

I'm inclined to believe you if for no other reason than because you obviously have drastically more data on this than me, but I'm curious about what would make it less fun for people in general?

I understand for IRL games that this would be a larger impediment to starting the game (ie: How do you figure out what your starting hand is? How do you ensure they match? etc) but for a digital implementation where that would all be transparent to the user, I'm just curious as to why/how that would reduce fun overall.

The Johnny in me likes coming back from a disadvantage at the start of the game and still winning. I feel this burden lifted off my shoulders when my opponent gets a lucky 5/2 where if I lose, I can just blame the opening and whine about it, but if I win I was David and I conquered Goliath.

game 727462 on oregon

I played a Vault, my opponent only had one card in hand and wanted to discard to my Vault (I had a forced win but it involved Kinging some more Vaults so he wanted to just skip the whole discarding business). From his end (and the spectator's perspective), it looked like he was able to discard his one card and I was supposed to act next, but it just told me it was waiting on him forever. My guess is that something forgot to tell my client that he was done discarding, even though he hadn't discarded two cards yet.

Perhaps this also explains the behavior where the bot freezes here too?

We were able to undo back and have him just decline to discard a million times, so I'm not sure if it will show up in the game log or not.

have self-stacking of starting hands. I've played a few tournaments where this is done,

...

Typically the way I've seen this done is that the kingdom is revealed, then each player is allowed to secretly arrange their starting hands however they'd like.

Hey brah <3

The tournaments he's referring to are tournaments that I've run. This is a rule I stole from another guy who uses it in his own tournaments, and after playing and running several IRL tournaments that use this rule, I like it and I'm going to continue to use it.

Why? Well, because it makes people feel better. One of the most visible sources of luck in Dominion is a 5/2 opening with a power five out there. It's true that this can put one player at a huge advantage and can sometimes be game-decisive in games where the players are roughly equal in skill. I don't want someone to walk away from my tournament feeling all salty because they were screwed out of ACTUAL MONEY (store credit) because their opponent got a lucky 5/2. It's an easy and visible thing I can do to tell people that I'm trying my best to run my tournaments in a way that emphasizes skill over luck.

It's for this same reason that I don't put Swindler, Urchin, Possession, and a few other cards in any of the kingdoms I use -- these are visible things that can cause one player to get screwed and feel bad, and my objective is for the people at my tournaments to have fun.

Do I actually belive that I'm reducing the effect of luck in my tournaments by a signifcant amount? Absolutely not. There's still a ton of luck in Dominion and the only way to get rid of it all would be to allow players to stack their decks every time they shuffle, which is not happening in my tournaments.

The argument that anything like this increases the skill component of the game or decreases the luck component just doesn't really fly with me. This effect is so small it's probably negligible. All it does is makes people feel better. Sure, there's value in that, but like, different house rules are gonna make people feel better than other ones. How will the devs know which ones to implement?

I kinda thought that the API that's on their list would allow people to make their own mods that could do this kind of stuff. If you want to play your variant online bad enough to write a mod that does it for you, go ahead. This frees up the devs to work on things that everyone will care about.

So in my opinion, this means that VP counter, options for random kingdom selection (always include a village, never include Black Market, etc.), identical starting hands, this, anything else that's not exactly what the rulebook says; should be left to these APIs. And maybe the more popular ones can be implemented by the devs with the default option being that they are disabled.

A couple of things that would be nice to put in the game log:

1. When someone plays a Charm, it can be difficult to tell which mode they chose. A line saying which thing they got would be nice.

2. Before the first buy in any given buy phase, it would be nice if the log had a line printed in it, saying how many actions remained, the money and buys. This would make the logs much more useful. You could even consider putting the number of cards left in hand in there too.

However, two features are planned that will improve the Crown experience:
1) we will add autoplay at some point. At that point Crown will get an autoplay "automatically end my action phase when the only actions I have in hand are Crowns" which will by default be on. People can decide to turn it off in individual games if that's what they want.
2) we will add an undo-mode that automatically grants undo when there is no new info. That mode will also be the default.

I like this solution :)

Well this isn't the Crown thread, so I'm not going to respond to this other than to say that I disagree with you.

And we've been through it all several times in the Crown thread. I've made my point there too so I'm not really interested in responding there either.

If the devs decide they want to fix this, they will have put this into their backlog. This thread has served its purpose. Whether or not they fix this particular thing, I don't really have a preference.

AdamH, as an easier start can't you just uncheck 'Respect Familiar Cards' on the game setup options if you're playing against a friend who just signed up? Not ideal for now but may get you up and running more quickly.

I'd love to! But the last time I checked, new tables you create don't remember the settings you used at your last table, and this is hidden under "advanced settings". I have a 100% failure rate at remembering to change this so far.

I've been meaning to bring this up again but I couldn't find the thread. I guess this one will do.

I've introduced several people to this new client in the past week or so and every single time I try to start a game with them we go through the exact same thing: it's the same base set kingdom with like one or two different cards.

We quit the game, then I have to tell them to go to familiar cards (which requires leaving the table. Why?) and check that they're familiar with everything, then I have to get them back to the table. This coupled with the fact that we've ended up starting games with bots because they have to click an extra button to sit down at the table (the button on friends list says "join" which implies that they would be playing the game, but no) has led to more than 55% of them saying they don't like the new client.

This is not the first impression you want to make. I warned you about this a few weeks ago, saying that the default settings for familiar cards were going to cause issues like this and here were are.

I realize some of this stuff is pretty low on your priority list, but man, turning off the familiar cards feature entirely would be better than this. This isn't what I want, I like having a way to play random sets while excluding the cards I don't like, but I really think a band-aid needs to be put on this for now.

A splash screen that comes up when a user first logs in, directing them towards familiar cards would work. Having the default setting for familiar cards be all cards would be better than just ten of them (yes I realize DXV has said he wanted it this way but man, every single person I've talked to disagrees). An "are you sure?" message when you're about to start a game with a bot when you have spectators at the table would go a long way.

These aren't permanent fixes but I can't imagine they would take that much time to do. The first-time experience users have with this client is extremely important to me and I think you should consider making these quick fixes now instead of potentially turning off lots of people from the game.

Just so we're clear, by this logic it's completely OK to cut corners on Crown where you disallow legal options that are just bad in every single case.

If that's the design philosophy that the developers are taking, it's fine with me (I actually prefer it) but then I hope it's consistently applied. Meaning that I hope Crown ends up with a better interface than it has now by using this.

Oh yeah, and if there's ever a card in the future that makes this matter, blah blah blah. This argument has been had already

Over in the Crown logic thread I had lots of people telling me that it was important to offer all legal options, even if they are not smart to do in-game and make the interface much worse. If that's something that's important, then it should be done here as well.

Don't get me wrong, I like the current interface as well.

I play a Sauna, then later on I play a Silver. I get the option to trash a card from my hand, or I can click a button that says "don't trash."

I think the default interface should be to not trash anything and then the button should be pressed when I do want to trash. The more common use case is probably this way overall and it's more intuitive. It's the same idea as Hamlet -- if I just click on my Silvers I want to play them, not play one, trash the second, then play the third. Or I could do even more damage to my deck (and not realize it!) if I have multiple Saunas in play.

The other thing that's weird is that the Play All Treasures button "works" for Sauna. If I click this button, it should not play any of my Silvers because they have a special ability when I have a Sauna in play (or perhaps it should auto-decline any trashing? I'm not sure what is best here TBH). As it stands, the Play All Treasures button will play treasures in a seemingly random order (I assume it's the order you draw them in but I can't be sure) so what usually happens is some of my treasures get played and then when it decides to play a Silver, it pauses to ask me if I want to trash something. The fact that it does this is pretty confusing to the user who doesn't understand why this weird thing is happening when they just wanted to play all of their treasures.

Play All Treasures should probably play groups of the same treasure together -- it's the more intuitive interface and will make more sense when the cards are stacked in the play area. They are grouped this way in the log so it would also be consistent there.

Another duration-area thing. When I have an Overlord played as a Duration card, the display for my duration area only shows an Overlord. While this is correct, it would be much more helpful if the display showed what the Overlord was imitating. Same goes for BoM and potentially other stuff.