Dominion Online Unofficial FAQ

[Chris is me]

Dominion Online 2017 Unofficial FAQ / Guide

My intention is to keep this updated and to expand it to include other common questions. Please reply if you think something should be changed or added.

Major update on March 10, 2017 - changing a bunch of outdated stuff

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Starting January 1, 2017, the license for Dominion Online transferred to a new company, Shuffle IT. Run by two expert Dominion players, the new client has lots of exciting new features and potential for growth in the future. Already there are some subtle changes to make the playing experience smoother and better. However, not everything is complete yet, and it isn't always clear how to do things on the new system before you are used to it. This guide aims to help answer common questions, help you get started on the new client, etc.

Note that I'm just a play-tester for the new client; I'm not affiliated or employed by Shuffle IT by any way and nothing in this guide should be taken as an absolute promise or the official last word on anything. I'm just trying to help!

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I have some other question that isn't answered here! Where should I go?
Maybe give the Shuffle IT Discord channel a try! This is a great place to get a hold of the developers or playtesters who can help you out. https://discord.gg/FnWd3KY


Getting Started / Transferring Accounts

Where do I find the new Dominion client?
http://www.dominion.games is the URL for the new client. It's easy to remember - when you want to play games of Dominion, go to dominion.games!

Why don't my Making Fun login credentials work anymore?
You cannot simply log in to the new Dominion with your old account credentials. You need to transfer over your account and purchases from the old software. See the next question for more details.

How do I transfer my old account and purchases to the new Dominion?
First you need access to the email your account is registered under. You should have an email from noreply@shuffleit.nl titled "Dominion Online - Welcome to 2017". Please check your Spam folder as many people have reported that the email is located there. If you still cannot locate it, contact Stef or Phillip for support.

The email has a few links in it, but in order to register your old account with your old purchases, you need to click the link labelled "this link". This will allow you to register using your old, reserved username from Making Fun, transferring your purchases with you. You will have access to all of the expansions you had bought from Making Fun or Goko. If you paid for the subscription option from MF instead, your subscription does not continue. However, a new subscription costs less per month on dominion.games than the old subscription cost.

Also note: You do not need to use the same username to transfer your purchases if you do not want to.

What if I did not have an old account, or I do not want to transfer any purchases?
Simply use the "Sign Up" link on the dominion.games page, and respond to the auto-generated registration email to confirm your email address, and you're good to go. Without paying for anything, you will have access to the Base Set of Dominion cards (including the new Second Edition base set cards). You can buy subscriptions to more sets if you would like, for any period of time you want.

Where is the mobile / offline version?
They're working on it. For now, the game is somewhat playable on mobile browsers, especially larger screens and tablets. You can get the game to work on a phone, sorta, with some futzing, and I've found it works more or less perfectly with an iPad. (Pro tip: Tap-and-hold to right click on these browsers)

Eventually, standalone apps will be released for various platforms, just like the good ol' days.

The offline version is also not out yet. If you intended to claim the "free Dominion Offline forever" option with your Making Fun purchase credits, you will not lose this option by playing online before Dominion Offline is ready. Once Dominion Offline is out, you will have the option to transfer your Making Fun credit in order to get the offline version for free (though you will not retain the free online subscription if you do this).

Where are Campaigns?
These are also in the works. Give them some time. For now, you can check the Dominion Strategy Wiki to see some recommended sets you can play against bots, and maybe even the old campaign levels.

Purchasing Sets

Why does the store show me expansions for sale? I thought I had everything?
This depends on how you purchased the sets. If you purchased the sets outright, you will have access to them online for a year, and you will have the option to exchange that online access for permanent offline access once the offline client is available. If you purchased the subscription option from Making Fun (available starting July 2016, until the end of the year), your subscription does not continue. However, the rate that dominion.games charges is cheaper per-expansion than the rate MF charged, so that is a plus.

No matter how many sets you bought, you do not have access to the Empires expansion, as it was never for sale on Making Fun and thus nobody owned it. It costs approximately 6 pounds / euros per year for a user who owned every card on Making Fun to upgrade to Empires by selecting the Gold version. The price is automatically reduced in the store to not include the cost of expansions you have credit for.

If the store lists a cost in the ballpark of 36 pounds / euros per year, and the store says you own no sets, something may have gone wrong. Contact Stef or Phillip for assistance.

How do I buy just the sets I don't have?
Conveniently, the store automatically discounts the cost of any sets you have credit for from the total cost of the subscription. It should cost a little over 6 pounds / euros to subscribe to Gold for a year if you have credit for every expansion except Empires. It should cost roughly 36 pounds / euros for a Gold subscription for a year if you have no sets. If you aren't sure how long you will play Dominion for, feel free to subscribe for any period of time you want, but note a small transaction fee is added to every purchase, so it is most economical to buy time in large batches.

I usually play games with my friends. Do they need to buy subscriptions as well?
They do not need to buy subscriptions to play with you. If you create a table and they join your table, they will get to use all of the cards you have subscribed to during games at that table. So if you have a Gold subscription, your friends can play with you using all cards even if they are not subscribers.

Friends, Tables, and Finding Games

I want to play a 2 player game right now. What do I do?
Go to the Matching tab. If you would like to play a bot (currently not the best AI), click "Bot Match" and you'll instantly start a game. Otherwise, you can click "Quick Match" or "Good Match". "Quick Match" will pair you up with the first available person, and both of your Familiar Cards lists will be respected. "Good Match" will take longer, but will pair you with someone close to your skill level, and you will not be matched with a player whose Familar Cards list is significantly narrower than yours. More on Familiar Cards later on.

How does the ranking system work? How do I view my ranking?
The ranking system is a work in progress - for now matchmaking is done using ranks imported from the old system. These rankings were based off of Isotropic, which is itself based off of Microsoft's TrueSkill ranking system. Currently there is no way to view your current ranking - more details about this will be coming soon. The ranking is used to help with matchmaking. Starting a new account gives you a fresh ranking (I believe of 0) - using an imported account will start you off with the old ranking for that account.

How do I create a table? Why do this instead of Matching?
Creating a Table allows you control of your game. You can pick the Kingdom Cards present in the game, you can change settings such as who goes first, you can choose the number of players to allow at your table, etc. Creating a table is great for playing with Friends or other specific people - right now since there is no global chat it is hard to notify strangers of your table and to get people to join.

To create a table, click the New Table button, choose the number of players, then hit Create Table. You can change the kingdom while you wait for someone to join, and you can change various game settings once someone has joined the table.

What is the point of the Friends feature? How do I play games with my friends?
The Friends feature makes it very easy to find each other when creating custom games. If you add somebody, you are "Following" the user. If they add you, they are "Following You". If you both add each other, you're "Friends"! Yay! Now it is easy to find your friends if they have made a game.

To play a game with your friend(s), one of you should click "New Table" and set a table up with whatever settings you desire. The other player can go to the "Matching" tab in order to see a list of tables currently set up by their friends. That player can then join the table and you're off. Much easier than scrolling through the full list of tables! In the future, you will be able to invite / challenge friends to games directly.

I want a rematch! What do I do?
At the end of a game, a "Ready" button should be in the bottom left of the screen. Once all players click the Ready button, a new game is started with the same settings you had before (but not the same kingdom, unless you specified a kingdom when creating a table). You can use the Chat to encourage your friends to play again!

How do I play against multiple bots, or with a mix of humans and bots?
With recent(ish) updates to the client, you can hit the "Add Bot" button to add a bot to any table. This allows you to play with 1 or more bots regardless of how many humans are present at the table.

The Tables button has LOTS of tables listed! What do I do?
The Tables tab has every active table listed on it at any given time. You can hit "Spectate" to view a game if it is active, or you can hit Play to try and join a table that hasn't started a game yet. The host of the table has complete control of the game (e.g. the kingdom). Eventually you will be able to see exactly what settings they have changed on the table once you join / spectate it but before the game starts.

Gameplay / Interface

How do I read the text of a card?
Right clicking a card, or long-pressing a card on a tablet, will allow you to view a large version of the card with the card text on it. The old "view all kingdom cards" feature from MF is not yet implemented, so you'll have to do this for each card you want to know about.

A card like Artificer, Hamlet, etc. is prompting me with a button to do an optional thing I don't want to. How do I not do the thing?
Just continue your turn! If you have more Action cards in hand, just click them to play them. Otherwise click End Actions to go to your buy phase. If you never click the buttons prompted by the action, the optional ability won't activate, and you can just "play through" the card's effect. This saves a LOT of time instead of clicking "Done Discarding" every time you play one of these cards. It takes some getting used to but it really is better in the long run.

Do I have to confirm every time I want to trash or discard a card?
This can be disabled in the Interface settings if you wish. 

How do I see the Trash?
In the area above the log, there is a View Trash button. Hitting this will display the Trash in the place the log was on. Hit this button again (which should now saw "View Log") to return to the log.

How do I see Tavern mats, Native Village mats, Island mats, or my opponent's Duration cards in play?
To see these items, click or hover over the username of the player you want to know about. These items will be displayed where the log normally is.

How do I see the state of my Journey token? What does each face mean?
You can see this next to your username in games that use it.

The Journey token was recently changed to match the behavior of the real token. If you see the gray face, it means the token is face-down; a colored face means the token is face-up. The token also has either a red or green ring around it - the green ring (seen when the token is face-down) means that the next play of your Journey token card is the "good" play, and the red ring (seen when the token is face-up) means that the next play of your Journey token card is the "bad" play.

How do I trigger a Reaction / Reserve / etc?
If you can't find something, it is probably, currently, in blue text at the bottom of the log. You can click the blue text to do things such as activating Royal Carriage or Duplicate. You may also be able to click the blue text in the floating display in the middle of the screen to do the same thing. Eventually everything will have a way to trigger it without going to the log, but when in doubt, when you can't find something, it's in the log.

I need to name a card for Wishing Well, Mystic, etc. How do I do that?
Click any visible instance of that card to name it. There is now also a text box that appears if you need to name a card that isn't visible. If you need to name a card that you want to be sure is not in the game (to deliberately not draw a card with Mystic, for example), you can type "Knights", "Ruins", or "Castles", which the text box recognizes but are not the names of any individual cards.

Why are some Base Set / Intrigue cards missing?
When the second edition of Dominion and Intrigue were released this fall, six cards from the Base Set and six cards from Intrigue were removed and replaced with seven new cards in each expansion. The online version now reflects the second edition of these expansions and not the original version. It is possible that the old cards might someday be implemented for custom games or something, but this isn't a high priority feature so I wouldn't expect anything soon. Trust me, the new cards are much, much better to play with than the old ones.

My opponent isn't doing anything. How long do I have to wait?
Currently, after 4 minutes passes, you can force an inactive player to resign. The plan is to modify this timer to make it more strict in the future. If you are playing against an intentional "slow player", waiting several minutes between each click, there isn't a lot you can do at the moment. There will soon be a way to report abusive players so that moderators can deal with them. For now, you can resign the game and report them to Stef or Phillip. Please provide the game number in order for them to look into it.

Can I undo more than one step at once? It's really annoying to prompt my opponent all the time.
Yes! Type /undo in the chat, then click the small dot that appears before the step you want to skip backward to. Your opponent will only be asked once and then you'll be back to where you want to be. If you know the exact number of steps to undo (I don't usually, tbh), you can type /undo N where N is the number of steps Other fun chat commands include /lobby to leave if you are a spectator, /resign if you are too lazy to hit the button to do so, and /bg N (where N is a number 0-8) to change the background.

I see this "Auto-Buy" option in the interface settings. What does it do?
Auto-Buy is a huge time-saver, but it is not always easy to use without trapping yourself, so it is not enabled by default. Basically, if you have Auto-Buy on and you click a card during your Buy phase, you will instantly play enough Treasure to buy that card, and then you will buy / gain that card. This is a great way to save time or to hide the exact amount of money in your hand.

You have to remember, though, that you can only play Treasures in your Buy phase before you buy any cards! So if you use Auto-Buy to buy one card on a turn where you have multiple buys, you will not be able to buy any more cards that cost more than $0! That's a bummer, huh? So if you want to buy more than one card in a turn, do it the old fashioned way - play all the Treasures you need and then buy your cards.

Also, if you auto-buy a debt card, the game will assume you do not want to play any Treasures to help you pay off the debt. This is because there are rare scenarios where you actually want to do this (Possession games) so the client has to be able to let you do that. So never use auto-buy to get a Debt card unless you know what you're doing - play those Treasures first!

Finally, if you use Auto-Buy to get an overpay card, it will assume you don't want to overpay for the card. So don't do that.

Familiar Cards

What are Familiar Cards?
Familiar Cards are a new feature of this Dominion client that is still being worked on. For now, if you go to the Familiar Cards tab in the main menu, you can mark what cards you are familiar with. In certain games (Table games by default, Quick Matches, etc) you will not play with more than a few cards you have not marked as Familiar Cards. The intent here is so that players learning the game will not be overwhelmed with a kingdom full of cards they know nothing about.

Is this why I keep getting Base Only games?
It's possible, yes! One reason you may keep gettting mostly Base Only games because you have not changed the default Familiar Card settings, which assume familiarity only with the Base Set. Right now you have to go to the Familiar Cards menu manually and select the cards you are familiar with. You can select entire expansions at a time so this should only take a few clicks. More features with Familiar Cards are planned, such as prompting users after games to mark cards they just tried out as Familiar, but this is not yet implemeneted. More to look forward to!

[gkrieg]

I would add something about how the bots don't currently work that well with trashing.  And have a high affinity to counterfeit, and don't ever name the right thing with contraband.

I would say that covers a large portion of the AI bugs.

This looks really good by the way!  I hope they sticky it.

[JW]

Great post! Another important thing to mention is that clicking "Ready" at a table with no other human opponents will start a game against a bot.

The "playing with friends" issue could be clarified slightly. Your friends never need a subscription to play with you. And your friends can get access to whatever cards you've subscribed to, which might not include all cards (e.g., with a Silver subscription).

"They do not need to buy subscriptions to play with you using all of the cards, as long as you have a subscription. If you create a table and they join your table, they will get to use all of the cards you have subscribed to during games at that table. So if you have a Gold subscription, your friends can play with you using all cards even if they are not subscribers."

Lastly, you may also want to link to the discord channel for people having technical issues - I know that Stef and Philip suggest that people use that.

[sunshinehippo]

Thanks! This answers a lot of questions I had about this version. (So far, I'm not very impressed by this company's version of the game...) 

[tufftaeh]

A card like Artificer, Hamlet, etc. is prompting me with a button to do an optional thing I don't want to. How do I not do the thing?
Just continue your turn!

I would suggest to add "by playing the next action card from your hand".

[Jacob Marley]

Under Purchasing sets, you may want to specify that the costs are per year.  We don't want anyone thinking they pay 36 euros once and have the game forever...

[tufftaeh]

/bg N (where N is a number 0-8) to change the background

Actually, the background numbers go up to 10 now. (And I happen to like 10 the most.)

[JW]

Under Purchasing sets, you may want to specify that the costs are per year.  We don't want anyone thinking they pay 36 euros once and have the game forever...

In particular, "per year" should be added:

It costs approximately 6 pounds / euros for a user who owned every card on Making Fun to upgrade to Empires by selecting the Gold version. The price is automatically reduced in the store to not include the cost of expansions you have credit for.

If the store lists a cost in the ballpark of 36 pounds / euros, and the store says you own no sets, something may have gone wrong.

[ffejselur]

Awesome job, Chris! I'd already posted that this site was screaming for a good FAQ and you delivered. Other things I'd appreciate and I think belong would be further descriptions of 1. Good Match: where you wrote "Good Match will take longer, but will pair you with someone close to your skill level" could use further development (It begs the question "How do I know my skill level, or someone else's?"). I've heard Isotropish ratings are being used to start, but I'm not sure what that means. I had to invent a new persona to get on quicker due to the email delay, so do I have no rating, an average rating, or the worst possible rating? Even before I had only played on MF not Isotropic or Goko, so for someone like that, same question. Of course it also begs the "What's my rating and where do I find it?" question, although I know that's still being worked on. 2. Tables: when I click the Tables button, I see this huge list of tables, some with "play" and/or "spectate" buttons and more. What does it all mean? Does the host have total control of what the kingdom cards will be? How do I know if they have no/Silver/Gold expansions? What about my "Familiar Cards" list? When it says "2 of 3-6", does that mean I could be getting into anywhere from a 3 to 6 player game at the sole discretion of when the host decides to start the game? So many questions.... Still again, thanks and awesome job so far.

[Chris is me]

Added fixes and updates as requested. Keep 'em coming!

[MVoltaire]

Maybe add a link to their profiles/email if you mention people should contact Stef or Philip. People might not know who they are or how to contact them.

Otherwise, great post! :)

[LaLight]

Topic is sticky now. Thanks for your work, Chris!

[Witherweaver]

Yes, but where is Forum Games?

[LaLight]

Yes, but where is Forum Games?

Here.

[ffejselur]

Here.

Are sure your true identity isn't LaDarkness? My ears!!!

[LaLight]

Here.

Are sure your true identity isn't LaDarkness? My ears!!!

don't tell anyone

[Haddock]

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.

[Witherweaver]

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.

[gkrieg]

Man I need upvotes for posts in this thread.

[wargames83]

Does Wait for Expansions under the matching option do anything?

[michaeljb]

Does Wait for Expansions under the matching option do anything?

Yes. I just tested this with an alt account that doesn't have any subscriptions; it'll get you a match with a table host that does have a subscription. My first game using that option was weirdly 10 Base cards plus 2 Landmarks--I'm guessing that had to do with what the host had marked as "familiar". The second game was a standard mix of cards from all the expansions.

I think it'd be worth adding to the FAQ something about this option. What's there now implies that a non-subscriber can only play with expansions if they join a table their friend specifically sets up, but you can actually be automatched with a random player that has the sets.

[Tatterhood]

This helps enormously. I discovered Dominion over Christmas break, so I was trying to figure out this new version starting January 1st while also trying to learn the basics of the game itself. I wish I had seen this sooner. I heartily second the idea that this info (and more) needs to be directly in the client. I get that attracting new users is not something you really want until things are more complete, but experienced players can't intuit everything about the interface either.

[hamstercrack]

I had a MakingFun account with several expansions purchased. I received a notice from MakingFun that I would receive a welcome email to the new version. However, I never received that email and cannot locate it in my Spam folder.

I sent a message to Stef last week, but haven't heard back.  What can I do to get my account moved over? 

Thank you.

[AdamH]

Now that this is being linked from the client, it would be nice to clean this up, maybe make it more "official." Some ideas:

1. Make this something more professional-looking than a forum post. One that ideally will be maintained by someone in an official capacity. Notably, there was an update today and this wasn't updated along with it (it's still a week old).

2. Table of Contents, FAQ section: section headers aren't that helpful and it's hard to know what's in here without reading a wall of text. Section headers should be complete sentences so that people can look over only those (ideally with links to more detail) and know exactly what's there.

3. Known issues: it would be great if people could come here and see a list of the things that are known to be problems. If there are workarounds for them, they should be detailed and extremely easy to access. If these features are planned for a future release, that should be easy to find out.

4. There needs to be something very visible to tell users how to get their questions answered if they don't see it here. Contact E-mails that don't require accounts separate from the one people already have to make to play on dominion.games, that they can communicate with would be a big plus.

I appreciate Chris's work in making this, but the software desperately needs something user-friendly to help first-time players understand what's happening. It's finally time to polish this thing and get it fully ready for the "big time"

[Chris is me]

At the very least in the meantime, I'll update this in the next two days - I have a flight on Wednesday which should give me plenty of time to flesh this out. Sorry about the slowness in doing that.

[JW]

At the very least in the meantime, I'll update this in the next two days - I have a flight on Wednesday which should give me plenty of time to flesh this out. Sorry about the slowness in doing that.

You shouldn't apologize at all. We should be thanking you for all of the hard work you've put into this! You recognized a need for a FAQ and filled it. At a minimum ShuffleIT should be collaborating with you to make sure that as new releases come out, this FAQ stays updated even if you are busy. 

[JKRich]

Don't know if this is feasible or not but let me throw out this idea: is it possible to move the FAQ to a wiki page on w.ds and have the client link to it there? That way anyone can update it when a new release hits and all the burden wouldn't be on Chris.

[AdamH]

This really should be written and maintained by the developers every release. If not a developer, than someone close enough that updates to the documentation can be pushed out at the same time as releases.

[JKRich]

Could not agree with you more AdamH. My idea was solely motivated by what appears to be the real vs. the ideal. There should've been a help/FAQ/how it works section of the website on January 1, in no small part because

the software desperately needs something user-friendly to help first-time players understand what's happening.

But the developers appear to have a blind spot on this issue, which shows no signs of abating. So if there's going to be a user-developed FAQ I thought I'd share an idea that might help. Still, I totally agree with you.

[AdamH]

Having something that isn't kept up to date is arguably worse than nothing -- if there's nothing there, at least people can look at the long list of things left to do and assume that it's coming some day. With something that's out of date, the question can be asked: "if this isn't being kept up, how can I assume the software itself is being kept up?" -- also, there really needs to be something of higher quality than this (I posted in this thread earlier about this) so the fact that this exists begs the question of whether or not that will ever exist.

Despite the fact that this FAQ is labeled as unofficial, it's still being linked to from the software itself, so it is official in at least some capacity. I feel like this middle ground is the worst possible thing in terms of the current state of the documentation: either there needs to be just a placeholder that says more is coming soon, or maybe more people should be given the ability to update the FAQ so that it's less likely to lag behind.

I realize I have sort of a minority opinion on this, but my professional opinion is that software is only as good as its documentation; meaning that unless there is a good-looking, useful FAQ that's kept up-to-date with each release, the software really doesn't hold up to anything. And I also feel pretty strongly that non-technical people should have a huge hand in writing this documentation.

[comet]

will I be able to view the tournament.
I am a member but not in the tournament

[fiver1]

Help!
I can log in to the tournament. However, I can not do anything.
This is the first time in over an hour of trying things that I can do something, I hope.
I can not find an opponent.
I can not post.
There is no options button.
There is no drop down menu.

Fiver1: bill17409@gmail.com.