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Good idea.

I also think the card that your mouse is over should be magnified as you mouseover, so that you can see it without right-clicking.  (Notably, I believe you cannot select it after right-clicking, which I think you should be able to do.)

The mouseover magnification is less necessary with stacking, but you can still have examples of many different Actions in your discard or in play (e.g., Black Market).

I've been reading Seveneves (Neal Stephenson), and I came across a quote that I found funny, especially in light of all the discussion on different preferences for interfaces (here and elsewhere):

"Remember, these things are designed for amateurs."
"Tell me about it," Ivy snorted.  "The user interface is so easy to use, I can't do anything."

I have now finished and revised all of the texts up to this point. Before, in version v1.0 (not the official Philip & Stef versions for Dominion as a whole, but my own little label for simply the text), I simply finished up the cards, and did not have a consistent format. Now, they should look similar or even better than the official 2nd Edition versions of the cards in most to all cases.

I see nothing else obvious to revise at this point, but if there is anything else you see that is inconsistent, be sure to let me know and I will be happy to go and change it!

You may not immediately see the changes, but when Philip updates the version it should be good to go!

Is the text more centered than ever before?

So it sounds like the only interface that makes both sides happy is the following:

When it's still your action phase and you play a Crown with no other action cards in hand, it should ask "Play in Action Phase" or "Play in Buy Phase". Any other situation, it just plays how it currently does.

I read what donald wrote and originally felt like this was ok, but after a second thought I realized that IF it was going to be implemented like this, it might as well be implemented like this for every instance you play a crown in (for the sake of the "perfect AdamH ui", because say I have [necropolis, crown, gold] the regular human brain is thinking "OH! let's crown that gold *clicks crown*). By implementing it like this you are teaching the user that this is how the card works, that when you play this card you get to chose if you want to jump to your buy phase or stay in action phase. To me this is both fundamentally wrong (this is not how the card works) and really annoying.

I'm thinking of it more like this:

Interface pauses when you choose to play Crown, and says "hey you might have made a mistake: did you mean to click the 'End Actions'? button first?  Here choose one of these options to clarify".  Since it is pretty likely that you did mean to click the 'End Actions' button first, and really such a 'are you sure?' thing is not that ostentatious, I think this is okay.

And you're not violating rules, you are clarifying, and then playing the card.

So it sounds like the only interface that makes both sides happy is the following:

When it's still your action phase and you play a Crown with no other action cards in hand, it should ask "Play in Action Phase" or "Play in Buy Phase". Any other situation, it just plays how it currently does.

I was just thinking that this seems to me like the best idea so far.

To be clear, I'm disagreeing that what you want is the best interface, and not just that it's a more difficult interface to implement. 

Edit:

Clicking the 'End Actions' button is a tad annoying, but the interface making decisions for me, even when it's the decision I was going to make, doesn't strike me as great.

The interface is not making decisions for you. All legal options are still there, it's just that the most commonly used option is the easiest one to do.

Here I was talking about the 'Auto Buy Phase' feature I had proposed (in the text that was not copied), wherein the client would automatically move you to the Buy phase when you still have Actions in hand in certain situations.  So yeah the interface is making decisions for you: it's deciding to end your Action Phase and start your Buy Phase without you telling it to.

I guess I got my edge cases and wordings slightly wrong, but my point remains.

When a user has a hand full of treasures, by default they should be crowning treasures. Leave the tricky interface for the tricky edge case.

But it is simply incorrect.  You have to play the card first, at which point you are in some phase, before selecting what to play.  You shouldn't deduce (and retroactively change) what phase you're in by what you do while resolving the card.  See what Donald said.

You could have something, like a feature wherein you are automatically moved to Buy Phase when you have 'dead actions' by default, unless in such situations where that would be bad (the 'edge cases' we've discussed).  Some examples include a hand of all Copper and {Necropolis, Throne Room, Crown}.  I'm not sure I would like such a feature.  Clicking the 'End Actions' button is a tad annoying, but the interface making decisions for me, even when it's the decision I was going to make, doesn't strike me as great.

You never play Crown 'as action' or 'as treasure', so that would be extremely confusing.  Perhaps 'Play an Action' or 'Play a Treasure'.  I think Donald's idea is fine: prompt a kind of 'are you sure?' thing.

"Play in Action phase" / "Play in Buy phase." Potentially faster than having to move the mouse over to the "end Action phase" button and then back.

Sure, I like.

Well, okay; I actually think there's merit in explicitly requiring you to play treasures, then buy things, especially for newer players.

I do not think it's a problem to get a click on a card from the player and figure out that they mean to jump to the Buy phase. The problem is retroactively changing what phase a card was played in, based on further inputs during resolution of it.

Right, I agree with this.

You never play Crown 'as action' or 'as treasure', so that would be extremely confusing.  Perhaps 'Play an Action' or 'Play a Treasure'.  I think Donald's idea is fine: prompt a kind of 'are you sure?' thing.

Edit: We also have multiple other Edge Cases: + Card Token, Enchantress, maybe more.

If I'm playing the tabletop game and I Crown a Copper at the start of my turn and my opponent shouts "HEY NO YOU DID NOT ENTER YOUR BUY PHASE YOU CROWNED NO ACTIONS AND PLAYED A COPPER YOU HAVE $1 THERE ARE NO TAKEBACKSIES I DO NOT GRANT YOU THIS" I would stop playing games with that person because that's ridiculous. I just feel like I should only have to go through that explicit step when it actually matters and just be able to play my cards in the obvious way the rest of the time.

When you're playing in real life, you can also just flash your hand to your opponent and pick up a card, and then toss everything into the discard pile in lots of situations.  New players do this quite a bit (even the guy that introduced me to Dominion), though pretty soon we start to see lots of reasons not to do this.  I try to point out that, that's not how the game works, and there are reasons, and it's worth learning the technical details of phases, playing cards, discard, buying, gaining, etc.

Of course, you can still do it because it's clear in real-life what intentions are.  We can't exactly expect a computer game to intuit such intentions.

If you were teaching a very new player to play Dominion, and they had Crown, Copper x4, this issue provides a good investigation into rules and card mechanics.

Edit: To make a more explicit analogy, when I draw Copper, Copper, Copper, Estate, Estate in the electronic version of Dominion, I can't click on Silver and gain a Silver!  Why not?  It's obvious I intended to play my Coppers.

Edit2: It is just very intuitive that the implementation of Dominion should follow the rules.  And not intuitive that it does not.  It says Action Phase when I play my Crown, but then it's suddenly not my Action phase before Crown has resolved?  That's simply incorrect.

[crucial]

I strongly believe that this FAQ should be linked in (or copied/paraphrased to) the client.  It answers quite a lot of questions I had about the way the client works - and I cannot be the only one.

In particular, right-clicking to see what the cards are is crucial, and mentioned nowhere else that I can see.

They should have a cute littler helper guy, like Clippy, but instead of a paperclip have it the floating disembodied heads from Making Fun.

People actually seem to think that the current interface is the best?

I don't imagine it is. For sure it should not be possible to click on Crown in your Action phase and find out you blew it and were supposed to click to end the phase first.

So how do you think it should function?

I think, though I'm not sure, that bots always Embargo Curses as well.  Has anyone noticed this?