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Finally getting around to updating this post.

I now have the full Kingdom viewer working, which also now allows for naming of cards that are not in visible piles, including split pile cards, individual knights, shelters, and ruins.

Installation instructions:

This can be installed via the Chrome Web Store at King's Courtier or by downloading it directly from Github.

To open the Kingdom viewer, simply click the "Kingdom" button on the left.



You will then be presented with this screen:



Some notes:

• The black market deck will not be a secret if you use this. I've looked into it, and unfortunately the only way for me at this time to hide the black market contents would unfortunately also risk leaking which cards are in your opponent's hand, due to the way the client model is structured.
• Any input that is waiting on you will be obscured by the card list. I can look into changing this later, but for now, make sure you close it when not actively watching so you know when it's your turn.
• When you play a "name any card" effect card, opening the Kingdom view will allow you to select all cards. (If this doesn't work, please let me know so I can update it.)

Duration cards do not move to your tavern mat, they stay in play, and thus do not lose their copied abilities.

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.

And I don't care what you prefer. Maybe I prefer to play Dominion with infinite Actions. That doesn't mean I'm going to try to get Shuffle iT to implement it.

Lucky for you, Donald X. implemented that for you as a Champion.  ;D

Huh, that's what they said about the VP counter. And lo and behold, now I am forced to play with it.

You are able to turn that off, though admittedly the table settings aren't sticky (yet - I'm working on adding that currently in my plugin).

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.

Hi!

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.

Some of these things are actually available right now. Variants of kingdom selection are already things I've looked into including with my mods and are definitely doable right now (including the 10 + player_count, everyone veto 1) as long as everyone is using the same mod or the mod supports chat interpretation.

[could]

Given the number of "exceptions" that you've already posted, purely from a software development perspective, this would be a nightmare to develop, and would significantly alter the gameplay, further expanding the existing Player 1 advantage that Dominion already has, to an extent.

I think it's great if you and your brother enjoy playing this way in real life, but I think this would be a massive alteration of the underlying game, likely on par with, say, including fan-made expansions.

However, an alternative suggestion, which somewhat addresses the original concern you had, while not anywhere near as drastically affecting the overall gameplay, would be to have self-stacking of starting hands. I've played a few tournaments where this is done, and works somewhat similarly to what you're trying to go for (reduce randomness and increase skill) while still operating under the base framework of Dominion as the rules outline it (because both players could have shuffled their hands the way they did).

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. So, you're not guaranteed the same starting hands unless there's a particular card that you both think is "the best opening". There are obviously likely to be drawbacks to this system as well (events or cards with on-buy events that alter your deck or hand, rather than gaining things into your discard, in particular, would still give P1 a pretty strong advantage by ensuring that they could always get those instead of getting lucky to get them) but the advantage of such a system would be that it more closely mimics the game how the rules say it is supposed to be played.

(I should note that I would also not really promote adding this alternative system in over any other development priorities, just that I think I would like it better than the blind reveal option, if forced to choose one option to address this "problem")

Using the VP Counter is also a variant, and that's already supported.  Not just supported in the programming, but also socially supported among serious Dominion players.  Now a game of Dominion is substantially different with VP Counter turned on... especially with cards like Fairground, Feodum, Gardens, Silk Road, Vineyard, Bandit Fort, Wolf Den, Museum, or Orchard.

"First 2 turns Blind-Reveal" is a minor variant compared to "VP Counter".  Making two purchases without knowing what your opponent(s) is doing doesn't affect the game that much.  It forces Player 2 to define their opening on their own, rather than aping Player 1.  That's it.

The difference between the two is that a point counter is theoretically possible without violating or changing any of the base game rules, as all it really does is simulate someone having a really good memory, or slowing the game down a lot and writing down what each person bought and then calculating the score each turn. There is no hidden information in Dominion, so a point counter just speeds up that process which anyone could have been doing in the first place.

Your variant is not. Additionally, there are several cards which would severely impact this practice. Summon, Villa,  Port, and Lost City (just to name four), can greatly impact how your turns go, and by not allowing the second player to react to the first player buying one of these cards, you're reducing their ability to play (especially in the case of Lost City, since they might have a different amount of money).

Nobody has suggested yet that Blind-Reveal hurts the game of Dominion in any way.  I've yet to hear someone say that it makes the game worse or less fun.  My experience is that it improves the game, and I think it has a possibility of becoming an accepted standard for the serious-minded Dominion players, like VP Counter.

See above.

We haven't started working on the Journey token

It's funny because there's commented out code on the page right now that could be turned on with a one-liner change to display at least a crappy version of the Journey token (it right now shows the Journey token when it's face up, and draws a green X on top of it when it's face down).

This is not a substitute for being included in the application by default, but I've created a Chrome Extension which adds this:  http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1380.0

what's new in 1.0.11???

I see a new 'View Trash' button now :-)

This is the thread where releases get posted:

http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=604.msg4367#new

At the time they had posted, there wasn't yet an update in that thread.

This is still very much a work in progress, but it was suggested that I post this here, since the other two mods are also here.

King's Courtier is a Chrome Plugin that adds some extra functionality to the Shuffle iT site. Currently there are only two features, but more are in progress:

• Kingdom Text View - This replaces all cards' images in the kingdom with their associated card text.
• Repeat Kingdom Button - This adds a "Repeat Kingdom" button to the end of game scoring screen, which when clicked will set every card in the kingdom just played as a required card.

Download from here:  https://github.com/Icehawk78/kings_courtier/releases

Configuration:

I'm working on a screen that will let you change which options are active, but in the meantime, you can change the options by opening your Javascript Console (on Windows, ctrl-shift-j) and running this:

Turn off the text-view kingdom:

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KC.update_preference('kingdom_text', false);

Turn off the repeat kingdom button:

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KC.update_preference('show_repeat', false);

Until the interface has been improved here, you can right click a card to check what it is before selecting.

Not sure if this is in progress or not, but one possibility could be to increase the z level of a card with a mouseover event listener and then return it to normal with a mouseout event listener, if you need the discard pile to maintain its ordering and the piling/grouping code isn't a non-modifying or otherwise safe option.

(Not sure where technical suggestions like this belong or if they're even wanted, if there's someplace else I should be posting this)

I mean; it's not like the old ones were particularly awful or were so powerful that using them ruined the games.  I guess my reaction is:  Why on earth not give the option?

I must be missing something.  :-)

According to Donald X, they were all removed for being particularly and notably bad, and we generally all replaced with other cards that did essentially the same "concept" but better.

See the secret history post here for more details: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1648227/secret-history-dominion-2nd-editions

Having looked at the client side code recently, it looks like this is in progress and might be implemented soon, as there's a decent amount of coffee related to getting "stack hints" ("card hints" is what the code is calling when you right click on a card) and is just not finished yet, rather than not having even been started.

I'll preface this by saying that it currently looks fairly ugly, doesn't react well/at all when dealing with split/varied piles, and may not work if there any any semi-significant UI changes.

However, a friend I was playing with really missed the "view all kingdom cards at once" functionality that the old client had, so I hacked together a simple mod that can be run from your javascript console, which will replace all of the main kingdom cards' images with their description text. The process is rather painful, so this is more proof of concept than anything else:

1) Run this first:

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angular.reloadWithDebugInfo()

2) This will cause your page to refresh, so you'll have to log in again afterwards. Once logged in, run this next:

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var jquery = document.createElement('script');
  jquery.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
  jquery.setAttribute('src', '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js');
  document.head.appendChild(jquery);

3) This will not have any visible effect. Lastly, once you have a game with the kingdom loaded, and you will have to run this literally every time that you start a new game, run this:

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$('[type="kingdom"]>.mini-card-art').css('background-color', 'white').css('background-image', '').toArray().forEach(e => {
var a = $('<div style="z-index: 100; position: absolute; left: 3%; top: 5%; min-width: 287px; text-align: center; min-height: 170px;">');
a.append(LANGUAGE.getCardText[angular.element(e).scope().pile.topCardName]);
$(e).append(a);
});

The end result should look something like this: