Dominion Things

Those of you around Seattle know that I'm a big fan of the card game Dominion. I recently bought a fourth set of the game and just last night had some people over to play it, and there are some strategic thoughts and concepts that I want to discuss about it.

First, for those of you who don't know what the game is, I'll try to explain it fairly succinctly. Dominion is a deck-building card game in which you try to earn the most Victory Points. Victory Points are normally accrued through purchasing cards in the game that are worth 1, 3, or 6 Points. Cards are purchased with Treasure Cards with values of 1, 2, and 3. Cards are put in your discard pile after you play them. As your deck runs out, you take your discard pile, shuffle it, and start drawing again from your new deck. Now the tension within the game is that when you start drawing Victory Point Cards into your hand, they're functionally worthless.

In order to help you in your quest to get Victory Points, there are ten "Kingdom Cards" dealt before every game. These cards can be purchased and allow you to draw more cards into your hand, or steal Treasure Cards from your opponents' decks, upgrade the value of your own Treasure Cards, give you Treasure points for this turn,
or any number of other Actions. Typically, you can only play one of these per turn, unless the effects of an Action Card allow you to play more Actions. It's how these cards interact that dictates the style of play of each game.

At the beginning of the game, all players are given a deck of 10 cards, seven Copper (worth 1 Treasure each) and three Estates (worth 1 Victory each). Each player takes his/her hand of five cards and you begin. What I want to do now is get into it a little bit here and figure out some math.

Assuming you buy one card each of your first two turns, you will have 12 cards in your deck. That means that any given card has a 41% chance of showing up in your hand. If you buy two cards, the chance that they will BOTH show up in your hand on the third turn is 15%. Suppose you bought a Smithy, which allows you to draw three cards when you play it, and you also bought a Village, which allows you to draw a card and play an additional Action. Fifteen percent is really good for you, then, because you'll end up drawing four more cards into your hand. But if you get the Smithy and not the Village in your hand, it's a bit of a bummer.

After taking your five-card hand, there are seven cards left in your deck. If you draw three cards, the chance of any specific card being within that three is 42%.

That's where I went wrong in the last game we played Sunday night. If you're going to take a Smithy early, you should resist buying other action cards until your deck is large enough that it becomes relatively unlikely that you'll pick up the extra Action Card while drawing three.

The other thing I notice is that a Village card is not all that useful in the early-going of a game. Village cards become more useful when your deck is full of actions, but until then all you get from it is a single card. You recall the odds of two specific cards being in your hand on your third turn being 15%. Trouble is that every time I play Dominion with folks and Village is in play, it gets bought up quickly because it can become a lot more useful later on in the game. I'm going to try to avoid Village the next time it comes up and see if I can make it work.

No days "off"

My concept of “the weekend” is pretty well broken. I feel that most people think the weekend is their time to kick back and relax. I spend my weekends trying to jam in all those kinds of things that I couldn’t put together over the course of the workweek. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the last time I went to play Hail to the Chicken in Oregon. I think it was a Tuesday. It might not have been, but whatever. If memory serves me, I was doing a bowling-alley day shift in West Seattle, then had to make a connection at the Storm offices in Interbay, then had to pick up Emily over in the U-District, and then get on I-5 and drive until I got to Salem, Oregon. Then we played Hail to the Chicken for a couple hours, we got back in my car, and drove to Seattle before collapsing asleep quickly because I had to work again the next day. It would be a little over the top to say “those are the kinds of days that I have,” but here’s the thing; I would totally do that again, and I can give you several examples of more recent similar days.

For example, I had weekend days this fall that started with playing in two baseball games on the eastside, then changing clothes in the car and driving into town to work a volleyball match before meeting up with someone to go to the Hurricane Café for a late-night hangout.

There’s something to be said for this kind of life. When things go well, it can be really fun: spending eight hours in a car with the right company is excellent, especially with a two-hour chicken-hailing break. People I know from college are quick to point out how I know everybody, and that’s partly because I really enjoy interacting with different groups of people. I recently met with a couple different groups on the same day when I played flag football with the guys I know because of the Internet and then left to go do play rehearsal with folks I know because of Church. Aside from having the drive to go do these kinds of things, I have to say it’s gotten easier over time now that I can have my calendar in my pocket at all times to stay on top of my ever-increasing and ever-changing commitments.

It is a double-edged sword, however. Sometimes things just don’t end up working out, or meeting commitments can become a stressful experience. Take today, for example. Friday I woke up early to meet a friend of mine to borrow his laptop. Then I worked out for a half an hour, drove to Seattle Pacific and did statistics input for four basketball games all the while hammering out details for my Canadian basketball trip on Saturday, my volunteer sleepover at my Church which I wound an-hour-and-a-half late to (there’s an art show there. The artists have left their things out and I’m sleeping here to prevent theft), watched a woman back her car into the side of mine while attempting a several-point turn (that wasn’t on my calendar), removed a good many objects from my car, and assuming I wake up tomorrow, I will have lived to tell the tale.

I have to admit that I don’t much like the risks of the lifestyle, having to hurry as much as I feel I do, but the rewards are pretty big when everything goes well. There’s also something fun for me to look back at what I’ve done over the course of a day or a week and ask, “How did I do that?” and genuinely mean it. It’s almost as if I get to pretend that I was a superhero or something.

Insiders, Outsiders, and Penn State

As a sports fan, I enjoy reading baseball blogs. That's not what this post is about, so hang on a second. One of the interesting things about sports blogs is that, in general, they do not have the inside access to a team in the way that a beat writer for a local newspaper does. Since the bloggers don't have direct access to players, the good ones typically rely on statistical tools or video breakdowns in order to make their points. Historically, the professionals have dismissed the work of the outsiders. This is one of the key elements of the Moneyball story.

In the last week, you may have read or heard about the incidents at Penn State University. In case you're unfamiliar, a Grand Jury investigation found that a former coach in the football program had been sexually abusing eight young boys over a 15-year period. Certain personnel at the University became aware of this by finding the coach in the act, including a graduate assistant, who reported the incident to the head coach of the football program, Joe Paterno, who in turn reported it to the athletic director. The Grand Jury investigation also showed that nobody from Penn State University reported what they knew to any officials, which by the way is mandatory. The University sanctioned the coach, though the athletic director admitted to the Grand Jury that such sanctions were "unenforceable."

If you want more detail on the case, you can read the wikipedia page or you can read the Grand Jury's Findings of Fact at this link. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not in fact read the Findings in their entirety.

Now back to the point of this post.

The Haiku Thing

I frequently get re-interested in doing things that I used to do. Apparently I have more interest in maintaining a continuity than the folks behind Red Dwarf did, but then again that's not a hell of a lot. There are two key things I reach back to, and that's the SMILE sign and the haiku thing.

Creating a Content Plan

If you're reading this, there's a good likelihood that you know I was in a play recently down at Fauntleroy Church. We rehearsed it three or four days a week for about six weeks before putting it on last weekend, and now it's over. On Friday night, we had a little party down at a restaurant close to the church, and I chatted some with the folks who came to the play on opening night and supported us.

One of the people at this party was the woman who is the music director for my church. We got to talking a little bit and she asked what it is that I do for work. I answered that I was temping, but starting to look around for more full-time work.

"Well, what is it that you want to do?" she asked.

Crosstown Traffic

This week has been eventful because I was made aware of, and then used connections to attain, a new temporary gig! The gig is for a social research company, and my role so far has been to read short written responses to survey questions and code them. The subject of the survey is the difficulty of transportation within the State of Washington. Survey responders were asked "What is the most urgent transportation issue facing your local area/your region/outside your region." I have 40 codes to use to categorize responses, which range from "traffic congestion in Seattle," to "roads," to "I don't want any of my money going to projects in Seattle where I don't use them." The survey had just a couple over 5,000 respondents.

In any event, after taking on two of these questions in the last two-and-a-half days and upon coding some 3,500 responses on Friday I think I have some thoughts about transportation policy that are worth sharing.

On Energy

I've pretty much grown up with the knowledge that people thought I was a little strange, or weird, or out there. I became used to it but I also take it for granted and forget it from time to time. My friends in high school were called "The Coalition of Nerds," by somebody. I'm not exactly sure who said it, but we took hold of that name for a while. Point to the story, I was attracted to Freaks N Geeks before I was a freshman at Willamette based on the name alone; I was atypical, and I knew it.

My strangeness comes from several areas, but for the most part I'm able to "pass" in regular society. Some of my interests are typical (baseball/sports), but the way in which I'm a fan of them is fairly extreme or geeky (closet of jerseys, regularly reading statistics-oriented blogs). The differentiating characteristic between me and the general population seems to be my energy.