DimOnion - Star Trek

I never watched the show much, so it was hard to come up with much.  Still, these have been sitting around on my hard drive, and I like a couple of them.

Ok, so this card used to be a Pawn with the reaction.  This was on purpose, and part of the joke.  But then people on the forums complained that a card isn't allowed to do exactly what another card does and then have more, not even in the world of fan cards, because people are insane on the internet.  But I changed it anyway, and maybe for the better - when you don't trash it, it's super-derpy, but then it has not one, but *two* ways that you can trash it for a benefit, making it a card you might actually play even without Attack cards on the board.  Weakening the connection to Pawn a little while strengthening the "this card is for dying" theme was better than a fair trade, and I like this card a lot more than Moat.  The only time I'd get Moat over this is if multiple attacks in a single turn are inevitable, but even then, I'm not happy about having to get a Moat.

A "blind Forge".  I went through a lot of variants before settling on this one.  It was tough.  In the end, the "up to two" clause sort of makes it bearable.  If you're scared, you can just LaForge two cards and gain them right back again if necessary (assuming those piles aren't empty...).  If you're feeling lucky, though, you can just play it as a blind Forge that costs $1 less to gain.

A Wharf pun.  This card makes reference to the Attack card type in a way that makes it a pretty useless card in the absence of Attack cards, unlike any other Dominion card.  This dangerously approached the territory of the Magic: the Gathering universe where every other card only affects White Kobolds, but oh well.  Hey, Rats is allowed to exist, and that card's beyond horrible without a strong trash-for-benefit card on the board, so I think this is fair.

He's really trendy these days on the internets.  A play on Steward, Stewart is all of those things at the same time.  Anyway, this is a strong mid-game card, sort of like a terminal double Junk Dealer.  But you might need to trash it later.  You often could be better off with an early Chapel or Steward, but if you're getting hit with junk attacks, this card is probably a great way to hang in to the end.

Anyway, other than that, I have cards for The Bridge, Borg, Scotty, and Number One, but they're not the best, and don't have images yet.

DimOnion - Flying Circus preview

Monty Python, ho!

Not a complete expansion-sized set yet, but they blend effortlessly with Dark Ages, so we're good.

 

Watery Tart is an Explorer variant, but has amazing use cases Explorer probably could only dream of.  If you manage to play this twice with one extra buy and a lot coin, crazy things can happen.  $18 and two buys is a four-Province turn, or with $19 and two buys, you could have a Colony and three Provinces (if eligible).  $22 and two buys gets you three Colonies and a Province, and $24 and two buys is the mark to hit to gain four Colonies.  (You need to actually have twice the needed cash when you play Sword each time, so these computations sometimes assume you had $X after playing just one Sword, and other times assume you'll accept a lesser Victory card.  The "four Colony" scenario could easily include a province or two if you used more than two Swords to get to the $24 mark.)

Aside from megaturns, $10 and one buy can get you a Province and a Duchy.  $4 for a Silk Road and an Estate isn't too bad, either, nor is $8 for Province + Island or Province + Silk Road.  If further testing reveals that this card is stronger than I thought, then I could see it being a $6 card.  In fact, having it only cost $5 could simply cause it to be bought earlier than when it's the most useful, anyway, not counting Garden or Silk Road games - but if you're drawing $18-$19 in a turn, having it cost an extra $1 might not even matter, so it's probably fine... I mean, if King's Court is allowed to exist, then Watery Tart should be ok too.  This card is probably obscene with Highway/Bridge, though.  On the one hand, I blame Bridge for being the most obscene King's Court target in the world.  And on the other hand, Watery Tarts are supposed to be a little obscene anyway.

Needs testing.  This card is not an Attack...  In the end, it's just semantics and axioms, and a card is only an Attack card if it says it is, and I felt it was better for game balance if it's just, um, "the bright side of life" and not an actual attack on anyone.

Something for you Cornucopia fans.  The discard "penalty" probably means I could add +1 action to this card without worrying, but it is also likely to be a strong Menagerie enabler as it stands now.  Still, this is likely to be a disappointing terminal in most games without the +1 action.  Maybe the +1 card should be +1 action instead... maybe it's just a typo?  I don't remember what I was thinking, honestly...

Possibly the only "-1 action" card in the entire Dominion universe including fan cards, the absurdity of Monty Python meets the absurdity of the Committee in this super-derpy card.  This weird Courtyard variant might turn your Actions into Treasures instead of saving them for next turn; or you can just think of this card as a Library variant.  If you need to be saved from a hand full of terminal collisions, then this can save you, though.  (The rules I'm using for this card is that your Actions count *can* go into the negatives.  For example, King's Court --> King's Court --> Committee --> Village would bring you down to 0 actions, then to -3 actions, and then up to +3 actions after the Village.  On another note, if the "You may do the following as many times as you like" might need to be watered down to be something you can only do once, if it turns out to be too strong, somehow.)

Just like the Camelot of The Holy Grail, this card is better the more remote it is in the far-away trash pile of memory.  My sincere hope is that this card Calvinballs the game to the point where it's difficult to form a comprehensible strategy of any sort whatsoever, but that's probably difficult to achieve, ultimately.  On second thought, let us not include this in the Kingdom.  'Tis a silly card.  (Wording was tricky here, and I may have botched it.  Three choices are made, but the player who played the card performs the three actions that were chosen.)

Band of Misfits, now seen through the magical third person perspective through the magic of Throne Room mechanics.  (The Curse gain/loss more or less follows the plot arc of the comedy sketch.  The misunderstanding brings turmoil that is eventually resolved.  This card would function pretty well without its last two sentences, though, and house rules could reasonably omit them up front.)

Cards also not forgotten:  The World's Funniest Joke, the Spanish Inquisition, and Bring Out Your Dead/He's Not Dead Yet/He's Getting Better.

Graphics for those cards soon, maybe.

DimOnion - Modern Times highlights

The main weakness of Modern Times is that it thematically doesn't mesh with any canonical Dominion set.  Luckily it's also the one I had the most card ideas for, and it's already a robust basic set with room to throw out a few losers.

The main card of the set is Debt, which is gainable through various means and at the moment, I'm having it come in a supply pile twice the size of the Curse pile:

Lots of tiny text, but it was hard to make a card "just barely bad enough" to make it a worthy penalty central to the whole game universe without going too far.  It still causes many games to be too slow.  The main culprit against game tempo to keep an eye on is this one, the Insider:

This one definitely needs to cost at least $5, but $6 may be too much.  If it ends up borderline in terms of power, then I will probably err on the expensive side in the end, because nothing slows games down more than this card, and a card that is only sometimes good is still better for the game than a card that always slows games down too much.

I love this card.  I mean, really, where would we be without Google?  This is a bit of a Sage variant, only it's more accurate, and it has such massively different best-use cases.  It chokes on junk attacks where Sage can be a savior, and it thrives on Provinces where Sage chokes.  (Sage is still a great Dominion card, mind you, and Sage can be very strong when your deck is still mostly Estates and Coppers, and all the way into the mid game.)

This is a fun card, but it often does nothing, and can potentially help your opponents.  It's slightly more likely to help you, though, because if you play some other cards and cycle a few things through, you'll ultimately have more candidate cards to consider "downgrading".  For example, you can Kids These Days your Duchy for a Google and then Google your Province for a Gold or whatever, or you can Kids These Days your Duchy for a Consolidator if you have two or more Debts already in hand.  (The wording is a little wacky, but it's designed to prevent being able to trash $0 cards for free.  I should have just specified that you may only reveal a card not costing $0, but for some reason, that thought escaped me.  Whoops.)

Not the most original card in the world, but it's so much better than Moat in a lot of ways, and Dominion needs a card like this.  Like Tunnel, it's a decent source of extra VP at the end of the game in any case.

The Consolidator uses the uncommon "return to the supply" mechanic to bypass the painful and crippling design of Debt.  However, he only consolidates, so you'll still have some Debt left over.  Sure, Chapel and Smithy would be nicer, but these are Modern Times.  This card is by far stronger when you were going to accumulate Debt regardless.

This card, like Mint, has an on-gain "penalty" that is actually one of the strongest reasons in favor of buying it.  This card is best bought only on turns where topdecking a Gold or Silver is likely to help you next turn.  (I should have made the player reveal the topdecked treasure, following the well-thought-out "accountability clause" design of Dominion.)

This card may have a lot of potential that's yet to be seen, but Debt tends to stop big engines from getting up and running, so far, but I could add more cards or expansions in the future.  This is also a deliciously thematic card.  The downside is that it leads to tough decisions, such as whether it's worth giving up one Action for one VP when your other card is a +1 card, +1 action card.  But that's just Modern Times for you.

I kind of like this card, but I seriously doubt I even know how to properly use it half the time.  Having it in play during a double-Province turn could really help out your engine, for example, but that's tough to pull off.  Other than that, you often need villages, and you might not have any other source of +buy.  If you're expecting a slog, you'll just need more Amazons to avoid missing reshuffles.  You also may want to keep track of them, and use the last one to store any Victory cards you won't be "shipped" to you until after the next shuffle.

It would be charitable to call home ownership a double-edged sword in Modern Times, wouldn't it?  (Balance work pending.  This card used to be horrible, but I improved it some, and the above version might be ok, but a very niche buy.  A debt-free player gains 4P overall on their first House, but the downside is immediate and very bad.  I could rescale the VP penalty, cost, and number of Debts gained at some point, though.)

Pretty close to being the world's derpiest card, I have no idea what to say about this one other than that it's sort of balanced maybe, and that it's really derpy on purpose - the above scene shows Bart pranking the local graduates with fake adjunct positions at "the university of psych!".  Master's Degree... Do what you were going to do anyway, for slightly more money!  But go into debt!

I have not play tested this card, but there's almost certainly no way that it can be balanced ever, not even in theory.  I'd love to be wrong, though, even if not being balanced at all is probably sort of the point.  (I really need to find or make a treasure-victory template, like the Curse template I made very badly for Debt in MS Paint.  But I'm just leaving this card as is for now.)

I trust the theme is coming across by now...  (Both of the lines after "If you do:" only occur under the above condition.  I probably should indent the last paragraph so it looks more sub-clausey.)

A card I haven't yet tested that I'm really curious about.  Image is taken from a beer bottle, a stout I used to buy whenever I could in Michigan.

DimOnion - Halloween Highlights

The Halloween set has some nice cards, and some annoying cards.  But overall the set is just too thin, and there is too much trashing.  I was a bit boxed in by trying to make every card's effects be as on-theme as possible, and the result was sometimes wonky.  Worse still, the prevalence of trashing causes some of the cards like Mummy to be more or less worthless.  Luckily the case is more or less old-school to the point where they wouldn't feel too uncomfortable hanging out with vanilla Dominion cards, but at the moment, an all-Halloween kingdom isn't that great.

Some of the cards are pretty cool, though.  My favorite is probably Full Moon, but it can only be used in a kingdom with at least one Attack.

There's a chance that it should cost $6, but it's a pretty dangerous big-turn card.  The riskiness of needing to draw a bunch of terminal actions in one try might justify the $5 cost, though.

I had to fix a typo I didn't even see until now.  The penalty is almost trivial with decent trashing on the board.  Otherwise it's a next-turn Knight variant with a Silver bane - as such, it's a fairly swingy card, but probably balanced.  Sticking with the theme leads to lots of little text, but it's sort of a fun card, and it's the reason Full Moon came about in the first place.  (I should probably change it grant +1 card if you play it on a Full Moon turn, though.)

A pretty balanced card overall, it's a sort of Bishop-Masquerade mix which doesn't have the potential to do "worse than nothing" (not counting the case of players with empty hands).  It might be a little strong for $4, and it definitely leads to games where junk attacks have a hard time working.

A weird Rats variant (this one also comes in a stack of 20) that can potentially be useful even in games with no trashing cards.  I kept it on theme, though - Zombies want to eat people and make copies first, then they'll eat anything that's not a Zombie (but no new zombies gained), and they die if there's nothing to destroy.  Naturally, you get VP for killing them.  I'm really bad with this card.  I always lose when it's out, whether I buy it or someone else does.  It's really finnicky, but not an ignorable card.  Sometimes you can just Zombie your deck out and then run out Estates or something silly, but it helps to have a third pile of $2 actions to run out while you're at it.

The others...

Sexy Scout is a Scout-Harem mix for the lulz.  Are you a girl?  Is it Halloween?  Any, they don't combo at all with themselves, so you might not want more than one early on, if ever.

Bat is sort of derpy, a self-wishing Wishing Well that is also a mild pest.

Igor and Frankenstein's Monster may need a little more work.

I want to like Mummy, but it's dead on a full Halloween board, largely because of Vampire and Igor.

And Ghost leads to really complicated turns with endless rule-checking; I have no idea how to redeem it.



And that's it for now.  I'm pondering things like Kraken, Monster Hunter, and Warlock, but I need a lot more.  Still kind of stuck though.  I might want to take this on in earnest again in a couple months.  It's already been 8 months or so...

North of the Wall

Hey there.

I have been keeping up with my online presence lately, just not here.  Mainly, joining-forces.blogspot.com has been at an every weekend pace, not counting this recently-missed weekend.  I'm just skipping that, and I'm bringing the effort over here to my writing blog to go over some things, and I'm going to warm up with this post about DimOnion.  But first, an original minstrel tune about Game of Thrones north of the wall:

Time well spent?  I hope.

Joining Forces - Parody Fan Comic In Progress

Hey everyone,

I'm still around, and I'm still sort of broke.  My latest project is the Joining Forces fan comic, which is roughly a fan parody of Sword of the Stars: The Pit (with added-on multiplayer for the sake of comedy).
You can start at the beginning and keep clicking "newer post" (unless I rework the layout someday).  For now, there are three episodes - a prologue, a title page, and a typical comic complete with a punchline.

Suggestive themes are present and will only get worse.  Not planning anything explicit, and it's all consensual (except some of the characters may be left unable to un-see, -hear, and -think things from time to time).

The Enchanted Cave 2 - Next Kongregate-to-Kickstarter Hopeful (Soundtrack by Grant Kirkhope)

While it's easy to burn out on the cynical antics of the AAA market and the tons of freemium MMOs flooding the the Flash portals, it's still a relatively good time for indie developers, and it's easier than ever to vote with your wallet for games that will never see a retail shelf.  These days it's only very difficult to make it work rather than nigh-impossible.

Looking to follow the footsteps of games like Defender's Quest and the recently-funded-and-Steam-Greenlit Super Chibi Knight, Dustin Auxier's The Enchanted Cave 2 is another game from an independent developer looking to leverage success on Kongregate to a sequel backed up by more experience and several times the developer hours going into it.  (Personally, I think a Flash portal completely dedicated to free indie concept prototypes should exist and have an editorial board or something.  That's just another entry to put on my "if I had X million dollars" list...)

The Enchanted Cave is a casual Rogue-lite game inspired by the Ancient Cave level of Lufia 2; fans of Desktop Dungeons will spot a lot of similarities.  It's a simplified turn-based dungeon exploration RPG with random floors, simple mechanics, and simple controls in which victory is more about choosing your fights and managing your resources than it is about leveling up.  While some uncommon items called Artifacts carry over from one dungeon run to the next, the rest of your gear is totally ephemeral.  While it's possible to grind-to-win, the return on investment for stat-grinding is much lower than in a lot of Flash games like Learn To Fly - good decision-making is indispensable.  The skill floor on guaranteed success is a good bit higher (though to me, the game feels like it's being played on the second of five difficulty levels, and I'd love to see more options).

The above is an interview featuring footage of the mobile port of The Enchanted Cave.  The sequel has some sample art in place, and has a 6-month development time charted out.

Grant Kirkhope has confirmed on Twitter that he'll compose the soundtrack.  (Goldeneye 64, Banjo Kazooie, Kingdoms of Amalur, some other stuff.)

The $10,000 Kickstarter has 21 days left as of this writing, and the funding is more or less exactly on pace to just barely make it, but it's hard to predict these kinds of things.  Further, the $15,000 stretch goal would surely be beneficial to the final product, possibly making it possible to Greenlight the release on Steam (or equivalent; I'd be more excited about a gog.com release).  He's giving away the iPhone and Android releases completely for free during the Kickstarter, so give it a shot.

Further, he's promising lifetime access to all of the games he self-produces for life to $50 backers (it's possible that he could get picked up by a studio in the future sometime, but I wouldn't blame him too much if it happens).

You can also pledge bunches extra to have vanity content programmed in.  If you happen to have more money than you know what to do with but zero ideas, send him $600 or so and tell him that you want the Taur Manifester put into the game.  He'll know what you mean.

Grrrr, minotaur.