When I was in college, some friends of mine played Magic: The Gathering. It's a popular card game for... not sure what to call it. The gaming community probably captures it best, though 'gaming' can also include video games and whatnot, whereas I'm referring more to the geeky/nerdy type of people who like science fiction/fantasy like I do, and often play Dungeons & Dragons and various other board games or card games. Like Pandemic. Gencon is for people like this, and it says it's the "largest gathering of tabletop gamers in North America", so I guess that's the proper tag.
My brothers got into it, independently, shortly thereafter so I'm familiar with it even though I never went past being a casual player. They eventually moved on, though not after buying thousands of cards (and gifting most of them to our second youngest brother, HiTek.)
Anyways, Magic has a few problems, in that a serious player often spends a lot of money buying cards, and thus has better cards in his/her deck. Which means they often have an advantage against people unable or unwilling to spend that kind of money.
Dominion, on the other hand, is a deck-building card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, but without its flaws. Everyone starts out with the exact same cards, and everyone has the chance to buy the exact same cards, so winning generally depends more on your skill in creating a strategy and buying the right cards.
I have to go into a bit more detail for the rest of this to make sense, so please bear with me.
In a deck building game, you have to build a strategy that will give you a winning combination of cards fairly reliably. You draw and play your cards in accordance with the rules of the game, and when you've played through every card in your stack you shuffle the discard pile and start all over.
That means your choices will appear in your deck, over and over, changing a bit with every new purchase or trashing of a card.
In Dominion, there are cards that allow you to purchase other cards (coins: copper, silver, gold. And in some expansions, platinum). There are cards that determine who the winner is (victory cards: estates, duchies, provinces. And in some expansions, colonies.) And there are various action cards, that do various interesting things.
You win by collecting the most victory points (each victory card is worth a certain number of points, so a province is far better than an estate), but most of the victory cards don't do anything in your hand. If you drew a hand of normal victory cards, you'd be unable to purchase anything, or take any sort of action.
A lot of the game is about building a deck that reliably allows you to purchase victory cards, while making them a small enough part of your deck that you're unlikely to get a hand full of victory cards.
This is where the action cards come into play, and I glossed over them because they are many. And varied. But you don't play with all of them at once. Rather, you randomly select 10 from whatever sets you plan to play with (there's multiple expansions, with literally hundreds to choose from), and put them in play.
All players are able to read what the action cards do, all players have the same options on what to buy, and winning depends (mostly) on coming up with a good strategy based on the cards in play. Experience helps, because you have a better sense of which cards have a synergistic effect with each other and are worth purchasing.
To give you a taste of what this means: one of the action cards in the base set is the mine, and it allows you to trash a coin and replace it with a better one. So you'd trash the copper card in your hand (not literally, there's a trash pile to discard it in) and put a silver card in your discard pile. Next time you shuffle your deck, that's one more silver card and one less copper. Do that enough, and you'll reliably have increased purchasing power per card.
In a similar fashion, everyone wants to get provinces (or colonies), because it's far more victory points per card... whereas stocking up on estates will just clog your hand, and make it more likely you won't have enough coin or action cards to do anything interesting.
The strategies you choose are entirely dependent on what cards are in play. One of my brothers, for example, likes to use cards that shuffle through his deck quickly. That is, if you have an action card that says something like "view the top card of your deck: if X place it in your hand. If not, discard it." He can have only one or two high powered cards in his deck, but having action cards that allow him to find it every single time means he doesn't need more... he just flips through his cards until he gets what he needs, uses it... and quickly runs through his deck, shuffles it all back in, and does it again.
Anyways, I went into this because I wanted to talk about attack cards, and their role in the game. See, some of the actions allow you to effect other players. The thief card, for example, allows you to take coin from other players. They have to show the top two cards of their deck and trash any coin, which you are allowed to retrieve from the trash pile. It generally is a royal pain to deal with, especially when you lose a gold or platinum coin. When the thief in play, pretty much everyone has a harder time getting enough coin to buy victory cards (or much of anything, tbh) and the game can drag on for a lot longer.
There are cards that force other players to discard down to three cards (a hand is usually five), or add a useless 'curse' card worth -1 victory points to your deck, or forces you to pass a card to your neighbor.
Now, when I play this with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards. It's sort of an informal convention, but we tend to prefer it that way. (Ofc, I generally see them when I visit the fam, and we're more likely to play cooperative games like Pandemic anyway. It's been a while since we've played Dominion together, and I'm unfamiliar with quite a few of the latest expansions.)
But when HiTek plays, or my brother and I play with some of his friends, the odds of someone using the attack cards are much greater. Heck, there are even people who seem to take great joy in being as vicious as possible... vicariously, in the game. They're generally quite nice outside of it.
And that's okay, too. Because even though I enjoy the more casual style with the fam, a good strategy would be able to win despite the attack cards in play. If the thief is in play, but the coppersmith is also in play, maybe you stick with coppers and use the coppersmith to increase their value. It would depend on what other cards are in play, though.
Anyways, I wanted to discussion the free marketplace of ideas, the wisdom of crowds (and lack thereof), and ways people try to influence the system in order to get support for their particular point of view, and Dominion seemed a great way to make a few points.
First, that we can establish a 'convention' not to use certain strategies, like purchasing attack cards. Second, that people may not agree to that convention, in which case you need to plan a counterstrategy that takes their actions into account. Third, that once you start using attack cards odds are pretty high that all the other players will, too. (I don't get people who do something shady and underhanded, and then turn around and get upset when their opponents start doing the same thing. You set the standard, you showed them that this is what it took to win, why are you surprised they're doing the same thing, using the same tactics to get one over on you instead? This is also why being a stubborn a-hole to your opponents is a losing strategy in the long term. Sure, they may give in the first few times. It's easier, and they don't really want a fight. But if you have repeated encounters, and they're always losing, eventually they get fed up and decide to get just as stubborn as you. Next thing you know, you're caught up in a pissing contest. Maybe a stalemate, maybe you'll have to concede something, or maybe you wind up in World War III... who knows? But constantly trying to one-up people instead of looking for a win/win is a risky strategy. At least, if the game involves repeated rounds with the same players.)
The fourth bit, the one I puzzle over sometimes, is how you can get people to change the game. Like, once the attack cards are in play, is that it? Are we just forced to accept that the game involves thieves, pirates, and brigands? Or - if everyone finds it unpleasant playing the game this way - can we get everyone to agree to NOT use such tactics?
The latter, well. It's a bit like a social dilemma, in which you'd need everyone's cooperation. And probably some sort of penalty for anyone who thinks they'd get some sort of advantage (generally just a short term one, since everyone else will then start using the same tactics) by breaking it. I think the key there, at least, is having the majority of the players agree that they're not really enjoying the game like this.
So, I dunno. If 'everyone' cheats in a game like soccer, but the players don't really like a game where winning matters less on how good they are at kicking and passing and whatnot than how good they are at cheating... maybe there's interest in cleaning up the game.
And maybe there isn't. I think the first step, though, is getting people to ask themselves whether they're really okay with it. After all, if most people are thrilled at a free-for-all where anything goes, well... good luck getting anyone to agree to restrain themselves.
My brothers got into it, independently, shortly thereafter so I'm familiar with it even though I never went past being a casual player. They eventually moved on, though not after buying thousands of cards (and gifting most of them to our second youngest brother, HiTek.)
Anyways, Magic has a few problems, in that a serious player often spends a lot of money buying cards, and thus has better cards in his/her deck. Which means they often have an advantage against people unable or unwilling to spend that kind of money.
Dominion, on the other hand, is a deck-building card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, but without its flaws. Everyone starts out with the exact same cards, and everyone has the chance to buy the exact same cards, so winning generally depends more on your skill in creating a strategy and buying the right cards.
I have to go into a bit more detail for the rest of this to make sense, so please bear with me.
In a deck building game, you have to build a strategy that will give you a winning combination of cards fairly reliably. You draw and play your cards in accordance with the rules of the game, and when you've played through every card in your stack you shuffle the discard pile and start all over.
That means your choices will appear in your deck, over and over, changing a bit with every new purchase or trashing of a card.
In Dominion, there are cards that allow you to purchase other cards (coins: copper, silver, gold. And in some expansions, platinum). There are cards that determine who the winner is (victory cards: estates, duchies, provinces. And in some expansions, colonies.) And there are various action cards, that do various interesting things.
You win by collecting the most victory points (each victory card is worth a certain number of points, so a province is far better than an estate), but most of the victory cards don't do anything in your hand. If you drew a hand of normal victory cards, you'd be unable to purchase anything, or take any sort of action.
A lot of the game is about building a deck that reliably allows you to purchase victory cards, while making them a small enough part of your deck that you're unlikely to get a hand full of victory cards.
This is where the action cards come into play, and I glossed over them because they are many. And varied. But you don't play with all of them at once. Rather, you randomly select 10 from whatever sets you plan to play with (there's multiple expansions, with literally hundreds to choose from), and put them in play.
All players are able to read what the action cards do, all players have the same options on what to buy, and winning depends (mostly) on coming up with a good strategy based on the cards in play. Experience helps, because you have a better sense of which cards have a synergistic effect with each other and are worth purchasing.
To give you a taste of what this means: one of the action cards in the base set is the mine, and it allows you to trash a coin and replace it with a better one. So you'd trash the copper card in your hand (not literally, there's a trash pile to discard it in) and put a silver card in your discard pile. Next time you shuffle your deck, that's one more silver card and one less copper. Do that enough, and you'll reliably have increased purchasing power per card.
In a similar fashion, everyone wants to get provinces (or colonies), because it's far more victory points per card... whereas stocking up on estates will just clog your hand, and make it more likely you won't have enough coin or action cards to do anything interesting.
The strategies you choose are entirely dependent on what cards are in play. One of my brothers, for example, likes to use cards that shuffle through his deck quickly. That is, if you have an action card that says something like "view the top card of your deck: if X place it in your hand. If not, discard it." He can have only one or two high powered cards in his deck, but having action cards that allow him to find it every single time means he doesn't need more... he just flips through his cards until he gets what he needs, uses it... and quickly runs through his deck, shuffles it all back in, and does it again.
Anyways, I went into this because I wanted to talk about attack cards, and their role in the game. See, some of the actions allow you to effect other players. The thief card, for example, allows you to take coin from other players. They have to show the top two cards of their deck and trash any coin, which you are allowed to retrieve from the trash pile. It generally is a royal pain to deal with, especially when you lose a gold or platinum coin. When the thief in play, pretty much everyone has a harder time getting enough coin to buy victory cards (or much of anything, tbh) and the game can drag on for a lot longer.
There are cards that force other players to discard down to three cards (a hand is usually five), or add a useless 'curse' card worth -1 victory points to your deck, or forces you to pass a card to your neighbor.
Now, when I play this with my father and one of my brothers, we generally just choose not to use the attack cards. It's sort of an informal convention, but we tend to prefer it that way. (Ofc, I generally see them when I visit the fam, and we're more likely to play cooperative games like Pandemic anyway. It's been a while since we've played Dominion together, and I'm unfamiliar with quite a few of the latest expansions.)
But when HiTek plays, or my brother and I play with some of his friends, the odds of someone using the attack cards are much greater. Heck, there are even people who seem to take great joy in being as vicious as possible... vicariously, in the game. They're generally quite nice outside of it.
And that's okay, too. Because even though I enjoy the more casual style with the fam, a good strategy would be able to win despite the attack cards in play. If the thief is in play, but the coppersmith is also in play, maybe you stick with coppers and use the coppersmith to increase their value. It would depend on what other cards are in play, though.
Anyways, I wanted to discussion the free marketplace of ideas, the wisdom of crowds (and lack thereof), and ways people try to influence the system in order to get support for their particular point of view, and Dominion seemed a great way to make a few points.
First, that we can establish a 'convention' not to use certain strategies, like purchasing attack cards. Second, that people may not agree to that convention, in which case you need to plan a counterstrategy that takes their actions into account. Third, that once you start using attack cards odds are pretty high that all the other players will, too. (I don't get people who do something shady and underhanded, and then turn around and get upset when their opponents start doing the same thing. You set the standard, you showed them that this is what it took to win, why are you surprised they're doing the same thing, using the same tactics to get one over on you instead? This is also why being a stubborn a-hole to your opponents is a losing strategy in the long term. Sure, they may give in the first few times. It's easier, and they don't really want a fight. But if you have repeated encounters, and they're always losing, eventually they get fed up and decide to get just as stubborn as you. Next thing you know, you're caught up in a pissing contest. Maybe a stalemate, maybe you'll have to concede something, or maybe you wind up in World War III... who knows? But constantly trying to one-up people instead of looking for a win/win is a risky strategy. At least, if the game involves repeated rounds with the same players.)
The fourth bit, the one I puzzle over sometimes, is how you can get people to change the game. Like, once the attack cards are in play, is that it? Are we just forced to accept that the game involves thieves, pirates, and brigands? Or - if everyone finds it unpleasant playing the game this way - can we get everyone to agree to NOT use such tactics?
The latter, well. It's a bit like a social dilemma, in which you'd need everyone's cooperation. And probably some sort of penalty for anyone who thinks they'd get some sort of advantage (generally just a short term one, since everyone else will then start using the same tactics) by breaking it. I think the key there, at least, is having the majority of the players agree that they're not really enjoying the game like this.
So, I dunno. If 'everyone' cheats in a game like soccer, but the players don't really like a game where winning matters less on how good they are at kicking and passing and whatnot than how good they are at cheating... maybe there's interest in cleaning up the game.
And maybe there isn't. I think the first step, though, is getting people to ask themselves whether they're really okay with it. After all, if most people are thrilled at a free-for-all where anything goes, well... good luck getting anyone to agree to restrain themselves.
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