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I think the more general question the devs should be thinking about is how to best use the availabe screen real estate to show as much information about "relevant cards" as possible. One of the few gripes I had with the Making Fun interface in the end was that it "shrank" duration cards when it was not that player's turn. It made it easy to overlook cards like Swamp Hag, Haunted Woods, Champion or Lighthouse an opponent had in play. I think it would be best if those cards, which are literally "in play", are shown in play, in normal size.

Introducing the Trash view and making it interchangable with the Log is a good start. Adding the cards on your Tavern mat and cards set aside for various reasons in a "new Trash view" would allow a player to have many of the relevant cards in view at one time. If this "new Trash view" (after renaming it to something more sensible) is duly "advertised" in the UI, this should clear up the big discoverability issue mentioed in this thread.

In addition, at least for desktop users which may have dual monitor setups, it should be possible to have the game open a new browser window (which the user can position on his second monitor) and display some info there (like the Log and/or "new Trash view").

While the Journey token has been commented on several times, it should be noted that the penalty tokens for -1 coin and -1 card are also not visible at the moment and can only be found out about in the game log.

It's interesting that I thought of that thread as well, just the other way around: Not thinking of even one case might 'ruin' (aka: not make it totally rules conformant) an otherwise good idea.

This seems to be a case of "not implementing the full rules because the way Butcher is handled is just a much better interface than what was used at Making Fun" and nobody would want to overspend on purpose for their own Butcher (as I did a few times on Making Fun when I did not account for cost reductions or simply had a calculation error).

Strategically, you should be able to spend all of the possessed player's coin tokens at the start of his buy phase, even if you did not play a Butcher during the possessed turn.

The problem is that there are many reasons to create a table where you do not want some "random stranger" to join, but which are still public (because there is no concept of a "private table" that is not seen by anyone yet).

Maybe you want to play with a bot, but want to try out specific cards or want to play with a mix of random Alchemy and Empire cards. Maybe you are waiting for some friends to join the table, but they are late.

I also tried to reproduce this bug and could not do it, it seemed to work as expeced:

Turn 12 - Ingix
I plays a Herald
I draws an Estate
I reveals a Doctor
I plays a Doctor
I names Estate.
I reveals a Copper and a Herald
I topdecks a Copper and a Herald
(remark: only reveals 2 cards because deck is very small)

The problem may be that during the choice of which card to select for Doctor all cards in your hand have a green border (are legal to be selected). This is very similar to what it looks like when you can play an action (your playable actions have a green border). Since Herald is a "surprise" card, I think it possible that the original poster saw the green border around his Herald when the Heralded Doctor resolved and clicked on it, because he wanted to play it. Instead this was interpreted by the game to mean "Select Herald for Doctor".

[considerable bigger]

@twasa:
Being polite is like asking too much ??
Investing 2-3 nice words in the chat is asking too much ??

Hey, we are all human beings, and most of them want to chat and to socialize beyond the pure game as part of a living community – please don't expect that all players here are only acting like dumb parkometers – what a terrible world !!

I've found out over the years that I play games mostly to socialize with friends. We talk about the game and other things while we play, as probably any gaming group. However, like probably most people, I can easily talk and do other things at the same time. It takes a considerable bigger amount of time and mental capacity for me to type (instead of talking) and do other things at the same time, especially if the other things are interacting with the game client.

That's why I consider the chat feature to be just appropriate for communicating very short status things like "Baby woke up, need to go" or "Need 3 min break". If I want to use the chat to start an actual discussion, about the game or something else ("smalltalk"), this would take up much more time and energy than actually playing the game.

When I first introduced a seasoned Dominion player (with no subscription) to the new online implementation, we used Skype to talk to each other. We fell into the pitfall of the game not showing any kingdom cards, which was caused by him not having any cards marked "familiar". We figured it out eventually, because I could talk to him and direct him to certain options which I guessed could be the problem. If I had to type that in, wait for him to respond, etc. this would have taken much longer than the 15 min it took us to figure out.

Later, when we were in the game, we talked about it, when we got a lucky draw etc., just like we do when we play IRL. He's a better player than me, so I'm very interested in hearing his opinions. And nothing is better than just taking 2seconds verbally to ask on some question that comes up in the game, than to take 15 seconds to type into the chat to formulate the same question. Maybe he is also asking/saying something at the same time. Verbally, this does not happen very often and it is easily solved, but in a chat (I'm not an experienced chatter, so there may be some well known things to do when this comes up)?

So while I agree that smalltalk is an important stepping stone to real conversation with strangers, the problem I have with chat in this Dominion client is that it isn't (in my opinion) good for anything but very short smalltalk, as a serious conversation takes too much time (at least for me). I can then understand that people do not like to be told that using some "formulaic" greetings are required, at least when they do not want to be in breach of an etiquette.

It's been remarked a few times that the current game client does not allow to show or select a certain set of cards. The "bottom" cards of split piles are the main culprit, but IIRC the prize pile for tournaments has similar problems.

[year]

I'm with Adam that communication of what's to come is suboptimal. For example, the sticky post "Missing Features" from Stef in "Feature Requests" is from December 10th, that is a time when the game was still in beta. The major complaints now might warrant a different prioritization than what was given at that time. Players probably also don't care that much about what's coming this year. They might care more about what's coming next week and/or next month.

Unfortunately there are so many different problems at the moment (mobile client, log problems, UI problems for different cards, no (visible) ratings, AI doing 'stupid' things with certain cards, standalone version) that I assume any progress will only affect one are two areas, and players who are not concerned with those areas will see no progress (a player playing against AI will not care that much about a rating, and a player playing against humans will not care about AI improvements, for example).


So I still hope for improvements, but I'm less optimistic about the game getting better soon than I was a week or two before.

There a few additional things to consider.

1) A pile with different cards in them can ultimately contain them in any order. With Ambassador you could get a split pile like Encampment/Plunder in reverse order or in alternating order or something similar. In addition, for the split piles this is open information. So ultimately, when you implement an interface that allows a player to inspect any pile, you will need to come up with a way to show that this pile has for example 2 Encampments on top, followed by 3 Plunders, followed by 2 Encampments and one final Plunder.

2) For Knights and Ruins the order the cards are in is not open information. For Knights it is at least known what cards the pile started with, but for Ruins even that is not known if you play with less than 6 players.

So I think there are 2 distinct questions a player can ask the game, and they need to be answered differently, although they can share UI:

A) What is the contents of a pile (not Knights/Ruins/Black Market pile) right now (with possible answers as easy as  "2 Provinces" or as complicated as I indicated in 1) above)?

B) What cards where in this pile (not Black Market pile) at the beginning of the game? This should indicate the original composition with the exception that for the Ruins pile the 5 possible Ruins should be shown, not taking into account that a given Ruin may not actually be in the game.

I'm not sure if this is the same problem, but when I ended the game with buying the last Colony, I drew my 5 cards for the "next turn" but then the game thought I was in the buy phase again and I could not do anything (even buying copper was impossible). See the attached screenshot for details:

The basic problem is simple: If there are not enough players at any time that want to play a certain format (say 3-player games with only human players), the game server cannot match them because they are no such players. The host of such a 3-player game will wait, maybe a minute, maybe more, and then do something else (on his PC/tablet/phone or IRL). If, after some time, some other player joins that table, he will wait for a minute (or more), but the host is not there, so the new player leaves, trying some other table.

The original host will look at his table once in a while, will (in most cases) not see anybody having joined the table (because the interval he checks in is longer than the new player will wait at his table), and continue to to something else.

Meanwhile the "other player" has the same experience a couple of times, and will finally say "I make a table with a 3 player game". After he does this, nobody joins him (lack of players for that format, remember?), and after some time he will do "something else" (because nobody wants to wait excessivly) and the cycle repeats.

The current table situation makes this worse as there are possibly many tables open each for format, but they are not matched against each other. If would possibly be better if you could not only be matched by the game server on 2 player games but on 3 or more player games as well. Then the person who created a table because he wanted the recreate his latest IRL dominion game can do that, and players who simply want to play a 2-3 player game can be matched with him.

[consistent]

OK I completely agree with you. I just think that there are no edge cases for Crown that can't be solved by "the next card you click should be doubled whether it's an Action or a Treasure"

...I have not gone through every single interaction though, so maybe I'm missing something.

What I am objecting to is that we should not starting going down that path were we need the computer to understand more and more *complicated* situations in order to provide the shortcut for the player to simply press the "End actions" button in this case.

Why not? The choice here is that either two people write some extra lines of code, or their product is worse. I think the product should be as good as possible.

In Principle:
Sometimes a consistent "game flow" that people can learn and apply is better than little shortcuts that are meant to make the game flow easier in some cases but in the end destroy a players 'confidence' in understanding the game flow when he is confronted with something that doesn't fit his mental model of how the game flow should work (like switching from Action phase to Buy phase after clicking on an Action card (Crown)).

In the current situation:
No code change is "free", it will always replace something else. I think there are still lots of other things that should take precedence.

[5 times]

This is something that will be very hard to effectively solve, as there are just so many effects it can apply to. For example at making fun, I set the "delay" to some middle value so I could reasonably see what happened when computer opponent played a card chain, but then I got to wait "for an eternity" if he used a Trader to get 5 silvers and the game client would show me each silver seperately 5 times.

I think the "too slow vs too fast" thing is actually pretty simple to solve in most cases. First, they need an animation to show everything that happens. Especially things like revealing a card with Herald or trashing with Rebuild. Then they need an option to turn animations off or control their speed.

The problem is that there are just too many cards that have these kinds of effects, and as I tried to explain initially, there are some effects that a player wants to have "slow", other effects that he wants to have "fast", this choice may depend on other cards in the Kingdom, and this disctinction "slow" vs. "fast" is different for each player. I don't think an option screen that lists 50 cards and asks "Do you want Trader gains fast or slow?", "Do you want Rebuild trashes fast or slow?", "Do you want cards revealed by Herald fast or slow?" a.s.o. is a good idea.

The point is that condensed information (each players deck at end of game) is a first step at understanding what happened. The "game over" screen already gives a part of that understanding by showing how the victory point totals were reached. Showing the players' end deck would add a considerable amount of information, at an (as perceived by me) small cost: The player's deck is already known and analyzed (for point totals), should be showable as text at this point.

In the long run, a replay of any past game, with all information visible, would of course be a very nice thing to have, but at the moment that seems far off.