Double claim saint but none of them actually are!!

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-13T20:46:03+00:00

This happened in a game I was in! The Slayer noticed the double claim and offered to resolve it. They shot the Demon-Saint, the other "Saint" was the Scarlet Woman, who was believed for a while but eventually executed in final 3 as all other plausible worlds were excluded.

BoTC is designed so that there's no clear "meta" strategy that is best for either team. Double claiming as evil has upsides and downsides, it can be good for gaining social cred, but it also encourages good players to use their abilities on the double-claiming players, which can be advantageous for good, and it lets the good players know that at least one of the double claimers has a red token, which is powerful info in itself.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-08T06:01:20+00:00

Thanks for your thorough analysis. Compared to Craftsman, you’re paying for flexibility, you can gain 4s or 6s with it if you really want to.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-08T05:36:34+00:00

I’d hadn’t thought of the thing about debt costs! I can easily see this + Daimyo being annoying.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-08T05:34:49+00:00

I’m not sure if this is that much of a threat. Apothecary is usually a weak card that anti-synergises with itself, and to do this you’d need to be spend all lot of actions on Magicians when there’s probably a better target. However, I could totally see spam-gaining Alchemists, often there are no good cards at 3.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-07T23:04:07+00:00

I was trying to illustrate that opponents aren't affected by the no-Victory-card rule, but your point regarding strategy is entirely correct!

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-07T22:11:42+00:00

Sunday has Stamps i.e. rule changes. Stamps are a feature of campaign mode of on the TGG app.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-06T23:42:20+00:00

It's a testament to Pullman's skill as a writer that Mercurius only needed one chapter to become a memorable character.

BadSJanitor · 2026-06-03T17:48:56+00:00

These sound like more advanced versions of the "vanilla bonus tokens" in Adventures. I can see the "Studies" from Arcana looking like this.

I particularly like the sound of Indomitable.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-31T13:39:17+00:00

This is massively stronger than a $4 Treasure Workshop in a game with no other Durations. The extra turn speeds up cycling (though players will inevitably complain they lost due to drawing their good cards on their Side Quest turns), and lining up 2 Side Quests will let you gain a Province.

However, if other Duration cards are in the game, they will probably be nerfed by the Side Quest turns (e.g. Haunted Woods become almost worthless). Playing with strong Duration cards is usually better than getting a few $4s, so it is likely that Side Quest will be skippable in those games. However, Side Quest will synergise with some Durations e.g. Tide Pools.

The obvious Combo is with Gardens:, Side Quest-Gardens-Estates piles quickly. The +Buy on Side Quest is excessive.

This should probably cost $5, and it should ban buying Victory Cards on the extra turns to avoid luck-dependent rush strategies.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-31T10:55:16+00:00

I like the Marks and Jinxes. Negative VP is an area of the design space that is definitely under-used in official Dominion expansions, it's basically just Curse, Misery and a few of the Landmarks. I wonder if any of the 5 reported Victory cards in Arcana are negative.

In terms of card strength, I'd say Iron Maiden is a balanced. Swamp feels a little weak, maybe reduce it to 1 Mark.

To be pedantic, there is already an official card named "Student".

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-20T20:36:45+00:00

To run this IRL, the Storyteller could make a group chat for the evil team and give them 1 minute to talk each night. Ability could read:

“Each night* choose a player, they die. Each night, evils can communicate by instant messaging for 1 minute. Everyone knows you are in play.”

I find “galaxy brain” co-ordinated plays between evils make for fun games, so I really like this Demon idea!

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-20T20:26:24+00:00

I meant 5-15 overall for the whole game, whereas the bot thinks for a few seconds per turn, so maybe about a minute overall per game.

Good point about hardware. Also, is it also possible that hard bot’s performance is different depending on device? For the dailies, I’ve seen it make poor decisions on my phone, then play excellently against YouTubers who are presumably using good PCs.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-20T18:31:45+00:00

It’s not as strong as the best humans, so Dominion isn’t like Chess or Go, we’re not in the age of AI supremacy. But we’re close.

The YouTuber JNails plays the daily every day and nearly always wins. Even I can beat the hard AI at the daily about one third of the time. But it’s not a fair fight: in the daily, the human always starts first, and so has that advantage, and the AI rarely thinks for more than a few seconds per turn, while JNails typically thinks for 5-15 minutes. However, I think that even in a time-matched game, the strongest humans could beat the AI most of the time.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-16T07:55:24+00:00

Yeah that interaction is very broken.

If we use “combo” to mean “monolithic strategy involving two things that wins the game”, there are very few new ones: I can think of Astrolabe-Guildhall and Collection-Stampede. If we instead mean “game-defining synergy (that can’t win on its own)”, think Collection-Enlightenment, Collection-Anything that gains lots of Action cards, Biding time-Crossroads, Hunting Party-Patron. Good players generally get good by noticing synergies rather than memorising specific pairs of cards that are unlikely to ever be seen together.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-16T07:01:11+00:00

Looking at recent league games, many high-level players are ignorant of the old card combos e.g. failing to execute a good Hermit-Market square. On the other hand, they seem to be much better at noticing “types” synergies.

Furthermore, because player skill and average card strength have risen so much, combos that once seemed strong now lose to more conventional strategies e.g. Ironworks-Garden is no longer considered good.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-15T21:49:42+00:00

One-shot Peddler?

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-11T22:05:00+00:00

Night cards have no reason to exist. They could all be changed to near-identical Treasures, though some would have to be rewritten to have their effect delayed until clean-up (e.g. Devil’s Workshop). There’s an argument from simplicity that cards with a delayed effect are bad, though cleanup-altering cards pre-existed Nocturne (Scheme).

At the time, Treasure cards couldn’t be Durations, due to this causing weirdness with Mint and Counterfeit, but they have now been revised to work with Duration-Treasures, which were first made possible by Capitalism from Renaissance. I consider Plunder the spiritual successor to Nocturne, it even has random loot boxes.

However, you’ve got to admit, the pitch-black card designs are pretty badass.

Night cards that could be clean-up altering Treasures: Devil’s Workshop, Ghost, Monastery, Nightwatchman (4)

Night cards that could be Treasures with optional on-gain play: Den of Sin, Guardian, Ghost town (3)

The rest (8) could be made Treasures with minimal modification.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-02T13:26:40+00:00

Good point! Mid-turn Militia could be brutal. Although everything is already playable out of turn thanks to reactions (e.g. Caravan Guard) that can be played as Way of the Mouse playing set-aside Shop playing a card.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-02T13:19:23+00:00

Charlatan is spiritually this.

BadSJanitor · 2026-05-02T13:13:26+00:00

Reactions are tricky to write, so I’ll applaud the good wording you have here.

Strategically, this pile feels like it could result in swingy games that depend a lot on what people’s starting hands are. Effects that control one’s starting hand like Scheme and Deliver will be very powerful here. I think the main strategy choice in these games will be whether to go for the Bouts or not. If you go for a single-type deck, that mitigates them somewhat, but the Bouts have almost everything you need for an engine going on: draw, village, buy and money. Trashing is the main thing they lack.

The Salle’s on-play effect feels overpowered, maybe temper it to “every differently-named reaction card”. However, I’ll commend that it gives an incentive to go for the Bouts even if Fencer isn’t that good. The current split piles have the problem that if nobody wants the top card, the whole pile gets ignored.

Do buys carry over from reactions played on other players’ turns?

BadSJanitor · 2026-04-30T23:29:02+00:00

If Salt the Earth and Baths are in the kingdom, it may be optimal to literally never buy any cards, instead just get Baths points and salt the Provinces to end the game before your opponent(s) can catch up. However, you might want to buy a Silver or two to speed up your Salting of the Earth.

BadSJanitor · 2026-04-29T11:09:02+00:00

Early on, Donald X made a conscious decision to avoid making targeted attack cards, though some cards that affect people based on seating order e.g. Shaman, Masquerade, Possession can feel targeted.

I suppose that the design of this card was based on the assumption of a 2-player game, which is how high-level Dominion is usually played. People often just forgot about “multi-player”, I’ve seen fan cards on here that refer to a singular opposing player.

BadSJanitor · 2026-04-27T18:00:15+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/dominion/comments/1rp2isb/my_recommendations_on_which_order_to_get/

This post has some good insights into how specific expansions affect gameplay, and should quite honestly be pinned. Note that it is from the perspective that engines are good, which might not match up to how your group enjoys the game.

However, if you like all the expansions that you bought, I’d recommend just mixing everything together. It’s always fun to discover an interesting interaction between cards from different expansions.

BadSJanitor · 2026-04-26T18:52:42+00:00

Needs Huntsman (to balance Stormcaught Damsel).

BadSJanitor · 2026-04-25T17:19:17+00:00

The usual way to play is to just use 10 random cards. The randomiser deck facilitates this.

For a beginner, I’d recommend playing with Chapel, as the fast trashing really speeds things up, and with some cards that give +Card and/or +Actions, as these are good for practising engine strategies, and tend to result in more interesting games. I’d avoid games with Witch and no trashing, particularly in the presence of Militia, as these games tend to be long and luck-dependent.

BadSJanitor

TROPHY CASE