Talk:Infinite Dvorak deck

This deck is perpetually under construction. If you want to join in, just add some cards to the card list.

Neat idea

This is a neat idea! As I remember cards from my gaming group's old 1000 Blank White Cards game, I'll add the ones that make sense (and probably some that don't) here. Edit: And in case you're wondering, the original cards designed for use with Full Deck were: Diamonds Are Forever, Gone Clubbing, "Cover Your Heart, Indy!", and Have Your Pet Spade or Neutered. Jtwe 21:03, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Tokens = Things

Wouldn't it be easier to define Tokens as created-on-the-spot Things? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Zaratustra (talk • contribs).

That plays heck with game balance. For example, "Hoard"...-Bucky 06:58, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I get the feeling this deck is never going to be particularly "balanced".

Tokens being Things sounds like a good idea from the infinite deck perspective - if a game features one token generator card, but no cards that do anything with tokens, then there's less card interaction than there could be. Treating all "destroy a token to achieve X" cards as "destroy a token or Thing" won't hurt anyway - if the effect is tailored for an abundance of tokens, then using a non-token Thing is just an expensive alternative, which is better than the card being unusable. --Kevan 10:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)]

My problem with that is if a card says "destroy a thing or things to achive X", tokens shouldn't count, as the point was the sacrifice of things. Should we just change all cards like this, or change the rule? --fanofphilosophy

I just realized that if a token is destroyed it would be placed in the discard pile. I assume that this isn't what was meant to happen. I'll change the rule to reflect this. --Ryan 1729 02:15, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Bucky

[Hex:] It certainly has odd synergies with Magnitude Error. :D Zaratustra 19:04, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Aw. Zaratustra 20:22, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem was that it applied to itself. Its actual base could not be determined, since it claimed it was some base other than "10".-Bucky 20:26, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Fanofphilosophy

fanofphilosophy keeps adding cards at places other than the end of the deck. Although this is not forbidden, the order of the cards is quite useful for tracing the development of certain ideas. -Bucky 00:42, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

"Create a card with any number of spellin or grammer mistakes and play it under another players control." - I don't know if it was intentional (and I'm not sure how you're expecting players to be able to fix the typos), but this is an easy instant-win card. --Kevan 22:14, 27 March 2007 (BST)

Sorry. I'm working on making it fair. Ideally, this card would be printed, and thus the edits would be made with pencil and/or pen. And, yes, all the errors were intentional, except for one. --fanofphilosophy

All right, Rouf Draft is fixed. . .I think. --fanofphilosophy

Oh, okay, so "all the mistakes are fixed" means "all the mistakes are spotted by other players". That works.

Cards can be created mid-game while playing online, by the way (at least through DvorakMUSH); you don't need an exception for that. --Kevan 01:17, 28 March 2007 (BST)

With "Desperado", the player who plays it would win even if there are fewer than 50 Things to destroy, making it a straight "I Win" card.-Bucky 01:52, 28 March 2007 (BST)

Clarified. --fanofphilosophy

Gray cards

Fanofphilosophy has been making a lot of gray cards lately. However, some of them are Actions and some of them are Things, so it's getting hard to scan his cards by eye.-Bucky 23:36, 28 March 2007 (BST)

That's only because I have no idea how the bgcolor system works, or what's "normal" for a thing or action. So I made it easy and made it all grey.--fanofphilosphy

For quick reference bgcolor=600 is Action-Red and bgcolor=006 is Thing-Blue. Unless you're doing something special (like Locations and Enemies from the Mario Bros. deck), that should be enough. If you want to know how those number work, let me know and I can point you to lots of web resources. MagiMaster 02:10, 30 March 2007 (BST)

Cards by Kazz

Card "Striptease" is unsuitable for online play. -Bucky 23:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I suppose it is. Should I be keeping that in mind? I'll delete it. For the record, it was an Action: "If you remove all of your clothing immediately, you win." Kazz 23:19, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Eh, that seems okay; the player would just have to somehow prove that they'd done this. --Kevan 23:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion, many of the cards by Kazz, when played, instantly unbalance the game in favor of whoever played them. While other cards, such as Magnitude Error, are quite powerful, few give their owner/user the sheer power of Horde, Throne, Pet, or Customs Board.

What, if anything, should be done about this? Horde is the worst offender, because not only are 9 Tokens cheap, but its protection effect also makes it powerful even without the victory condition. Throne is overpowered because there is only one card (Antimatter) that can destroy it without permission. Customs Board basically lets you see everyone's hand. Pet is overpowered for obvious reasons.

Again, should we adjust these cards? Should we introduce counter-cards knowing that they will probably not be used in the same deck? Or should we just let it go?-Bucky 06:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Uhm, apologies. I was the one that informed Kazz (among others) of the existence of this page, knowing of his tendency to do this kind of thing. Zaratustra 06:28, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

The cards themselves are cool, they just need to be weakened. For example "Throne" would be fine if limited to negating one action per round, Horde would be fine without a victory condition (since it has a side effect of not allowing you to spend tokens) etc.-Bucky 07:06, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Given that this project is public, these cards are probably quite mild. We're bound to get straight "I win" cards coming in eventually.

Maybe we should view the card set as infinite and inevitably containing broken cards, and let players decide what subset to actually play with; the export functionality could be tweaked to allow "all cards except by this user" or "only include cards by these users". --Kevan 10:05, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Kevan

Instant Speed

Does Instant Speed imply that that you could play an Action, then play another in response, then another in response to that, etc.? What about if you played a card that allowed you to draw? Would you be able to play the newly drawn cards in response to drawing them? (I'm only asking out of curiosity.) MagiMaster 18:03, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I suppose it does. Which isn't too powerful, but is a bit of a boring way for it to be used. I'll reword it. --Kevan 19:14, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Brand Loyalty

It seems that Brand Loyalty forces people to only use cards by Kevan. Perhaps it should say "except this card", or something? --fanofphilosophy

Good point. --Kevan 00:07, 29 March 2007 (BST)

Terrible Secret of Space

That last part doesn't need to be there. Robots aren't living things. CashCrazed 08:27, 30 March 2007 (BST)

Cards by KillSmiley

The cards "Free-For-All" and "The Dreaded Legal Department" are colored and written as Actions, but are of type Thing. This should be corrected. -Bucky 03:56, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, he corrected it.-Bucky 05:25, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Ryan_1729

Zork Dork

For Zork Dork, the card type "Quiz" is meaningless. If it's an action, a type of "Action - Quiz" would at least tell players what to do with it. --Kevan 11:25, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

alright. --Ryan 1729 11:56, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Win conditions

I'm guessing you've not played any Nomic - all your "create a new card but it can't have a win condition" clauses are completely toothless; it's trivial to create a card saying "other players may never take any more turns" or "draw 1000 cards and play any number of them" or, indeed, "create another new card, and this one can say anything you like". --Kevan 21:17, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, small suggestion; each and every one of your cards has text coming out of the bottom. It's a card game, not a library. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Zaratustra (talk • contribs) 23:23, 9 March 2007.

Your new "this card may not allow you to win this or the next turn" wording would still be broken by a card that said "Take two more turns after this one. You win at the start of the second turn." - any card that lets you create a new card with any wording is going to have loopholes. --Kevan 12:33, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Short of removing the cards, this seems like the best solution. It gives the other players time to draw a card like "Gotcha" or otherwise stop the player from winning. --Ryan 1729 23:39, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

How about "Any player may discard a card to remove the new card from the game"?-Bucky

Perfect. --Ryan 1729 03:19, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Lock and Key

Don't forget the "cards shouldn't refer to other cards" rule - it's very unlikely that your "Lock" and "Key" cards will both be drawn in the course of the same game. (Even if you meant "a 'Key' card" to mean "any card that could be considered a key", we've yet to see any sort of key card appear in 250-odd cards, so it isn't going to be a card type that occurs very often.)

Also, you seem a bit confused about the distinction between "destroy" and "discard"; reading the glossary might help. --Kevan 10:08, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Spamming the deck with duplicate "Key" cards isn't a particularly interesting solution to this. --Kevan 22:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Office

"If five or more cards that count as office supplies are played on this card..." - I'm guessing we're going to get five "This card counts as an office supply." cards from you, now. Please try to think a little harder about the infinite nature of the deck, and the "cards shouldn't refer to other cards" guideline. I've just reworded it to add a useful rule of thumb - if you made a deck from a random subpage of 100 cards, and added your card to it, and your card would be completely useless, then you should think about rewording it. --Kevan 11:22, 27 March 2007 (BST)

Office is just as useless in a game with less than five office supply cards as Alphabet coup, Playing With a Full Deck, The Obliteration of All Other Life Forms, Anagrammaton, Top Trumps and Eight Men Down and a few others without the necessary cards. There are also many cards that only interact with living things and as of right now only one card exists that counts as a living thing! Although there are a few that can create them. Also it is currently possible to randomly choose a deck with no way to win or lose and with no way to end the game short of abandoning it. --Ryan 1729 23:38, 27 March 2007 (BST)

Alphabet Coup and Full Deck both have the same specificity problem, but the others all rely on card aspects that are at least fairly common. I think you've overlooked "If there's an ambiguity, vote on it." in the Special Rules for this game (which does in fact cite "living things" as an example). It's much easier to have a vague voting rule for this sort of thing, than to have to guess what sorts of qualities future cards are going to be looking for. So you could word your Office card as "If five or more Things that you would find in a normal office..." and it could include earlier and later cards (like Receipt Drawer) which weren't aware of there being an "office supply" card trait.

You're absolutely right about randomly choosing a deck with no victory condition; Zara and I tried a MUSH game with cards 201-300, and both ended up resigning when we realised how rare and difficult the victory conditions were. When I get around to writing a customised export script, I'll add something to make sure that any random selection of cards includes a good number of victory conditions. --Kevan 00:12, 28 March 2007 (BST)

I thought the idea, as far as 'counting as whatever', was that you didn't have to specify most of the time and people just voted on it if they were unsure. I wouldn't think you'd have to specify 'office supplies' on stuff like paper and staples. You might have to specify on stuff that you think should be office supplies, but not everyone might, like coffee. MagiMaster 00:11, 28 March 2007 (BST)

Obscurity pays off

This card is an "I Win" card online because everyone has access to dice of any number of sides.-Bucky 02:45, 28 March 2007 (BST)

The electronic dice rolling machine on the MUSH, you mean? It's a bit of an "I win" card regardless - the race condition of "first player to" is meaningless, as the player who's drawn the card can just look for their dice and make sure they have them ready immediately before playing the card. --Kevan 10:01, 28 March 2007 (BST)

Okay, would you rather I tapered it down to some amount of money or gold tokens? --Ryan 1729 00:14, 30 March 2007 (BST)

Cards by The T

Shovel says to draw the bottom of the deck. However, in an infinite deck such a card may not exist. Similarly, a few other cards say to search the entire deck, which we can't do since we have not defined all the cards in the deck.-Bucky 18:20, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Although the deck's theoretically infinite, any actual game of it will involve a finite subset. (I'll probably end up putting an "output just 100 random cards" option on the card export, so that this can be played on the Dvorak Engine without crashing it.) --Kevan 18:22, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by Zaratustra

"Spend 1 Energy to produce 1 Blood." - maybe I should reword "cards shouldn't refer to other cards" to stress the infinite thing more; even if there are other cards that refer to Energy and Blood in the deck, if they don't come up in the same game then this card is meaningless, and fairly useless. (Well, usable as a generic, effectively-blank Thing, but having a blank card in the set seems a bit of a waste, when it could have had a similar but game-affecting mechanic.) --Kevan 23:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

"Produce 1 Blood" is fine because other cards can read "Destroy/Spend 1 liquid Thing". likewise, "Spend 1 Energy" is fine because you can use many kinds of Energy, presumably including Heat, "Lightning Bolt" cards etc.-Bucky 23:59, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, that feels like it's straying into Blank White Card territory, where anything can mean anything if you argue it entertainingly enough; although that's fun, I think it's useful to keep the distinction that Dvorak has strict and consistent rules.

Maybe it'd be good to have a general rule about resolving arbitrary decisions - whenever anything is open to interpretation (like Katamari's "smallest Thing"), it goes to a straight vote, and if there's no majority verdict then it's resolved in some generic, automatic way. But Artificial Heart's "spend 1 Energy" puts far too much onus on the players to decide what "spend 1 Energy" counts as; whether a Lightning Bolt should generate more than 1 Energy, whether Springfield Nuclear Power Station should be able to "spend 1 Energy" every single turn without destroying itself, whether a player's sweeping Plasma Storm can power someone else's Heart, etc.

"Discard or destroy an electricity-related card you control, to put a Blood counter into play." would work better, I think, with players only having to vote on whether a particular card is "electricity-related" or not. --Kevan 00:18, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

There, better? Zaratustra 01:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I think so. Argue this out with me if you think I've got the wrong idea about how this deck should work, though. --Kevan 01:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

"The Only Winning Move" is badly worded; For example, it allows you to win if at any point earlier in the game three other players had each skipped a turn for unrelated reasons. A better wording would be "You win the game when 3 of your turns have been skipped in this manner."-Bucky 02:37, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Cards by cashcrazed

Jihad

Would a player force his or her opponents to tell their religions? It would be unfair to let some tell and some not, and yet mean to force people to tell.--fanofphilosophy

I didn't figure a person's religion was any sort of personal secret. If they have a problem with revealing their religion, then I guess they just lose the Thing. CashCrazed 03:05, 30 March 2007 (BST)

Well, I agree that it probably wouldn't be a secret, but it's not something I would want brought up during a game either. MagiMaster 03:15, 30 March 2007 (BST)

The player who played it could reveal what their religion is, so the other players would just have to say whether their religion is the same or not. --Ryan 1729 04:23, 30 March 2007 (BST)

Archival

We've got 99 cards so far - maybe we should archive off every hundred into its own linked page, to stop the main page from getting too heavy. I suppose wait until we have 120 or so, so that the page doesn't look too blank when we archive it. --Kevan 12:16, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Almost 150 now. Zaratustra 21:07, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

There are 220 at the time of this editing --Ryan 1729 12:35, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Infinity

Is the deck supposed to be one of each of an infinite number of cards, an infinite number of each of a finite number of cards, or an infinite number of infinitely many cards? This would effect the probability of things like getting two Annoyance cards on top of the library, etc. MagiMaster 06:36, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

The way I see it, it's an infinite number of different cards, one each. We think of the number as infinite because there's no limit to the number of cards we can create and we'll only be playing some of all the different cards at a time anyway due to physical or engine constraints. BiggerJ 09:00, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

That was my thinking as well. --Kevan 12:41, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Backdoor Special Rules?

Maybe this is just me seeing things from a Nomic perspective, but cards like Rules Misunderstanding and There are 10 kinds of people in the world are Actions which create ongoing effects - effectively it's adding a special rule to the game. Is this good or bad?

It seems a bit untidy from the player memory perspective (most Dvorak decks and similar card games require that players only have to read the cards on the table to find out what's going on), and also a bit overpowered - if a Thing adds an ability or restriction to the game, there are all sorts of ways to destroy or remove or reword that Thing. But if an Action says "Until a winner ith declared all playerth mutht thpeak like thith.", there's nothing that any player can do to reverse that, unless there's a rare "terminate all background effects" card (which might never get drawn). We could spiral out into card mechanics that add and remove background effects, as we did with tokens, but should we nip it in the bud instead? --Kevan 09:37, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Since there is currently no penalty for breaking or forgetting these rules players could slowly faze them out with no ill effects. Also if such a card is destroyed is it still binding? --Ryan 1729 10:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

If these cards were Things, then their effects would immediately stop being binding upon destruction; Things only have an effect while they remain in play. The rules have no specific opinion about an Action that says "for the rest of the game, X", but given that the Action card doesn't say "until this card is somehow removed from the game, X", I think most players would interpret the effect as continuing. --Kevan 10:48, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Rules Misunderstanding has been changed. Zaratustra 14:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, in the "thpeech" card example a player could just say "I am the winner" and (depending on interpitaion) negate the effect.(Note: I did not see this possible loophole when creating this card.) We could reclassify these cards as things that are immediately moved to the discard pile after being played to achieve the same effect. (Interestingly no one has complained about my equally if not more indestructable "Catch 22" card.) --Ryan 1729 12:24, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Things that move immediately to the discard pile and leave a ghostly permanent effect would give exactly the same problem; you have ghostly permanent effects floating around that players have to remember the exact wording of, and which they can't do anything to destroy. It would be better to have these rules written on Things which stay in play.

(And for what it's worth, I'd say that the common-sense game rule interpretation of "all players must thpeak like thith" is "anyone who doesn't is therefore no longer a player".)--Kevan 12:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

"Catch 22" Is in fact destructable with any of {Wrath of Bucky, Brazen Buckyism, Wikipedia Says It's True} and probably others I'm not remembering.-Bucky 15:49, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Alphabet coup

As of addition of card "Fun Time!" it is now possible(though very unlikely) to win using card "Alphabet coup." --Ryan 1729 12:03, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

It was possible anyway with "Pocket Universe".-Bucky 15:49, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Spam

Is this card too obnoxious? It would grind the game to a halt if everyone simply spent their turn drawing Spam from the top of the pile, then using their Action to put it back there for the next person. CashCrazed 09:06, 28 March 2007 (BST)

Export problems

The 'Print this deck' and 'Generate MUSHcode' pages for this deck seem to skip certain cards for some reason. Is this fixable? BiggerJ 05:44, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Seeing as it seems to skip my cards, perhaps The underscore in Ryan_1729 is the problem? I'll temporairily change one of the two Switcheroos to see if that fixes it. --Ryan 1729 08:47, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

That didn't work. To be specific it seems to skip newer cards and all of my cards. What (if anything) is done to upgrade the 'Print this deck' and 'Generate MUSHcode' pages when new cards are created? --Ryan 1729 09:13, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Looks like it was because you were the only person to capitalise "card" at the start of each template. I've updated the export functionality to cope with this (it's an external script that I wrote myself, so there's no public access to it). --Kevan 10:43, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

That would be because I copied and pasted from the template each time. The price you pay for laziness I suppose. --Ryan 1729 12:39, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I just tried the print this deck page and noticed that "Fly on the wall" and "Action prism" had no text and type unknown. I removed some unnecessary spaces and they seem to work. --Ryan 1729 12:51, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Trip reports

Has anyone actually tried playing this yet? I would very much like to see descriptions of playthoughs of this game (and, if possible, transcripts of games of it played in the Dvorak MUSH engine). --BiggerJ 07:31, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Not yet. I'd rather wait until I changed the deck export so that it could filter out cards by specific users, but maybe I'll find time to do that today. --Kevan 12:08, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Time found. You can now specify a comma-separated list of users whose cards you want to skip; they'll be crossed out, and listed as "skipcard", which the Dvorak Engine should just ignore as an illegal command.

We should be able to skip individual cards, too, without excluding other cards by the same author. See "loophole" for an example.-Bucky 17:17, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, since you're cutting and pasting the cards anyway, you can put them through a text editor first, and just delete any cards you don't want to use.--Kevan 19:43, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

So would anybody be up for testing this in either the Dvorak MUSH Engine or Apprentice, over the next few days? --Kevan 14:28, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm up for it. Since you usually show up on my early afternoon, Friday and weekends are good days for me. Zaratustra 15:54, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm busy tonight and out tomorrow, but could maybe manage Sunday. I've added an upcoming games page to attempt to coordinate this sort of thing, if anyone wants to call a specific time and date. --Kevan 16:13, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to leave out cards by specific people? --BiggerJ 11:45, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

If there are some broken or annoying-to-process cards in the set (I remember there being a few), then they're likely to have been written by the same person. --Kevan 19:43, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Have just tried feeding the entire deck into the Dvorak Engine on the newly-created Dvorak MUSH, and it choked around the 250 mark. Not sure if it's hitting a configurable limit, or something intrinsic to the TinyMUSH software, but I suppose it doesn't really hurt to play with a subset of 200 or so cards. I'll throw together something to randomly select which 200 to use. --Kevan 17:48, 25 March 2007 (BST)

I just played two games with Zaratustra over MUSH with the first 100 cards. The first game ended on the first turn because of a slow reaction to "Leverage Scam"; the second game ended when I Hoarded 9 Tokens. Branch Statement proved to be impractical because we couldn't implement cutting the deck properly. I can imagine it would be difficult to keep track of tokens, because the Notes would get crowded fast.-Bucky 22:02, 25 March 2007 (BST)

I played a couple of games with Zaratustra as well, using the second hundred - he put a Triplicate onto Lightning Reflexes in the first one, but slipped up by playing Draw Two in response to Tarot Reading (which had given him a Thing) and lost the game. The second game ended with him getting Power Level Scouter and a Crowded Room. Can't remember any broken cards, but BZAAAAARG could use clearer wording as to how exactly a player's turn should be randomised. --Kevan 00:05, 26 March 2007 (BST)

Fixed BZAAAAARG, thanks for the critique. Just one clarification I couldn't fit in the card text that could be easily deduced anyway: if the player whose turn is randomized has only Actions or only Things in his/her hand, randomization of what kind or kinds of cards get played during that turn won't be necessary. --BiggerJ 09:41, 26 March 2007 (BST)

I'd go for tighter wording, even if it means sacrificing some of the card's possibilities (maybe "Choose a player. On their next turn, they must play one random Thing followed by one random Action, if possible. All decisions required by them shall be made randomly.", or something - "randomized by a random number generator" is a bit of a meaningless tautology anyway).

When you're actually playing with these cards, the ones with more than a few lines of text become quite heavy and wearying, a lot more so than reading them in isolation on the site. --Kevan 11:28, 26 March 2007 (BST)

Okay, I've used your suggested wording. Thanks for the help. --BiggerJ 12:42, 26 March 2007 (BST)