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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I've played a lot more games than that and used to be one of the highest rated players on Isotropic and then on the current site. I don't know what this guy's talking about at some points. People were hammering duke/dutchies back in the isotropic game. I don't think anyone overlooked the kings court/goons/masquerade pin for one game, let alone thousands. It just doesn't come up much.

He leaves out my biggest criticism, there is no form of errata/banning. When an overpowered card enters the fray, you just have to play it. Minion's on the board? Guess we're just fighting for 'em.

Chapel should cost more than 2 no matter what Vaccarino says. Probably 5. Etc.

Vaccarino is a great game designer but I think the playtesting could be better sometimes, and unlike CCGs with developed tournament systems there's no changing a card once it's out there ever.

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I disagree about Chapel's cost. A 5 cost Chapel would lead to extraordinarily unbalanced games where a good starting hand basically sets you up to win.

Having the cost be 2 means that everyone gets access to it in the first two hands with out there being much swingy-ness in terms of the initial shuffle.

Maybe an argument could be made for 3 or 4 in the sense that everyone would still have access to it, but 5 just seems too high.

There are lots of boards where a 5/2 split is a tremendous advantage. Chapel already contributes to that, as the article mentioned, because the player who got 4/3 really got 4/2. You get Chapel and a good 5 drop and your opponent with 4/2 can just go ahead and concede on turn one.

But making it 5 takes it out of the opening hand most of the time. That’s why most of the best cards are 5.

I’m not 100% sure it shouldn’t be 3 or 4 but it definitely shouldn’t be 2. And I’m fairly sure that if it trashed 3 cards instead of 4 it would still be extremely playable (given how many times good players take worse trashing than that in the first round) and that the play testers back then just didn’t know the game well enough yet to understand.

>I disagree about Chapel's cost. A 5 cost Chapel would lead to extraordinarily unbalanced games where a good starting hand basically sets you up to win.

It already has that. If you draw 2 coppers in your first hand (and thus five in the second or vice versa), you can start out with the awesome five-cost card and chapel.

For serious competitive play, all players should have the same opening split, or get to choose 5/2 or 4/3. Chapel games tend to make this weakness obvious

> For serious competitive play, all players should have the same opening split

I would consider the Dominion League[1] to be serious competitive play, but it doesn't require that (also the current online client doesn't support that, presumably due to lack of demand) but what it does is to balance which player starts first, which can often lead to wins since in the end the game is often decided by a single turn.

[1]: http://dominionleague.org/rules

Chapel should just be removed from the game.

A good number of cards have been removed from the game

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Removed_cards

It looks like most of them were removed for being too weak.

Yes, I believe these were all removed from early editions of the first sets released, largely for being weak or boring.

I have the first edition and after playing both I completely agree, the replacement cards are overall much better. To the point where I rarely ever want to play my own set.

The article is from 2012.

Ha that makes a little more sense then.

I like that there's a couple of famous must cards. It makes kingdoms exciting it there's an occasional race to pick up lots of one card. I might ask to skip Minions if it's on the board twice in a row but it's one of my favorite cards. If there were more effective reaction cards, it might play a bit more dynamically.

If Chapel were nerfed, adding a condition where buying it caused that player to gain curses would be interesting. More so than increasing its cost.

Btw if you haven't played an all-star kingdom before, where you put 10 of the most famously powerful cards on the table at once, it's a hoot. Mining village, chapel, minions, harem, etc makes for a dynamic game.

> there is no form of errata/banning

I liked Isotropic's solution for this, which was to draft 12 cards for the board, and then each player vetoed one.

You could also set a ban list. IIRC just about everyone had Possession on theirs.

I do have a bit of a ban list. Possession, minion, masquerade. The cards that take over the board nearly every time. I’ve not much desire to play yet another minion game.

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