Doomtown

I suggest that you give Doomtown Reloaded a try.
In my opinion it’s the one newish card game which plays completly different than the rest.
The learning curve is high, I won’t lie and you probably need to get 10+ games under your belt to really grasp the concept but it’s worth it.

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Doomtown really is the only other LCG that is very very different from the “dude bashing” type games like Netrunner is. I just got done watching some of Team Covenant’s coverage of the Marshall event at GenCon, and Doomtown looks insane.

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Magic fans always talk about how they describe their game as chess poker to newcomers but if any game is actually like chess poker then it’s Doomtown. The Team Covenant videos are worth watching, if you know the basics of the game. Also they have actually best of 3 in their finals. Huge step up from FFG tournament rules.

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Too bad they murdered that game with bad game design decision like the lack of mulligan, and then put in a really really shitty option of getting yourself a bad mulligan that punishes you if you use it, if you put one specific character in your setup.

Also, nearly every game of Doomtown that you play, if you were to play it, will result in a turn 1 giant shootout in the middle with all characters, where whoever wins the random fight will win the game.

All of the experienced players will go “no! If you are experienced, that doesnt happen”, and then you watch their game, and they go all in for a giant shootout turn 1 in the middle.

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No, doomtown is one single hand of poker with a deck that you made, and you hope that your initial hand that you cannot mulligan had some cards that help you win the one poker hand in some way.

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Also, hidden, free, blow-out cards that hyper-punish you for trying to make a consistent deck. Or, that hyper punish you when your non-consistent deck that tried to avoid cheating… happened to cheat, because you didn’t build it bicycle.

I may be a little salty about Doomtown. Really wish the “cheatin” punishment had all been the lower-power, re-usable, on-cards-in-play stuff like they gave Law Dogs, instead of hidden, non-opportunity-cost-free game-enders.

It’s not even losing entire posses to shit like Double Dealing. In landslide v landslide, a turn 1 One Good Turn cheatin’ resolution off lowball is basically game since it’s a resource-progression fight.

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Meh. The games I watched were not like that.

Finals, Game 1 | GenCon Marshal 2015
Finals, Game 2 | GenCon Marshal 2015
Finals, Game 3 | GenCon Marshal 2015

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Agree with this. Doomtown is a game which I recommend more for players who are bored of the usual “creature combat” card games. It takes quite long to understand the game and is now one of the deepest current card games with experienced players. However, game is still quite clunky and reboot should had been much more streamlined.

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I have no idea who you’re watching play Doomtown. They might be experienced, but that apparently doesn’t stop them from being bad.

There are now multiple ways to take a mulligan, or not.

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There’s no such thing as non-opportunity-cost-free cards in Doomtown - that’s what makes the deck building such a brain burner. Even if the effect is strong, having that value in your deck affects its opportunity cost.

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I really like the mulligan rules for Doomtown, though I don’t have a lot of experience with the game. Grifters seem like an interesting way to incorporate mulliganing into the game itself rather than a meta-level mechanic.

I think it’s a slightly weird one, but I do think that having mulligans being tied to specific characters is a really interesting thing to do, because you might also be considering the secondary stats as well as the pure mulligan ability. For example, I had a Legendary Holster deck that I did ok with in a couple of tournaments that used Travis Moone as the Holster carrier, even though I maybe wanted the Gina mulligan instead, because he had two bullets to her one.

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I tried Doomtown a bit. I struggled a lot with the big gunfight in town square plague. I can see that it’s probably a neat game, but understanding when to pick fights and with whom is really awkward.

That overwhelming force isn’t usually the best option is really counter intuitive for something that looks and feels like a combat game.

I think combat could have lived with being a little less harsh. I agree with the above statement about cheatin’ resolution clubs cards.

Also, hexes, miracles and mad science are really awkward ways of limiting deck building.

This means that you dont understand game design at all. :stuck_out_tongue:

I was watching designers of the game attempting to show us that it wasnt all about the big gunfight in the middle on turn 1, and the game resulted in big gunfight in the middle on turn 1.

I moved all the Doomtown discussion from the AGOT thread to here. Feel free to debate it’s merits in this thread please.

Personally I agree with Alex. Doomtown is probably the worst designed card game I have played in some time. It has not a single ounce of elegance anywhere in it’s overly complicated systems, forces unintuitive play, and has heaps of randomness.

Not to mention the mulligan rules are essentially the most objectively bad mulligan rules in existence. The entire Grifter mechanic is total garbage, and acts as a way of punishing those that want consistency.

In Netrunner terms, it would be the equivalent of saying only certain identities get to mulligan, and when they do mulligan they start with less clicks.

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The other day I got involved in a discussion on a Game of Thrones Facebook group (I know, that was my first mistake) in which somebody was saying that Netrunner had too much variance. But he didn’t mean agenda flood or random accesses - he said that there was too much variance because ice is played face down and that it was therefore down to luck whether or not that screwed you.

The reaction you’re having to reading that sentence is the same reaction I’m having to most of the Doomtown criticism here :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I won’t argue about a certain lack of elegance and it not being very intuitive, though. The unintuitive nature of it only really bothers me insofar as it is off-putting for new players. I don’t really care otherwise - it’s just part of a very steep learning curve that hides a very deep and satisfying game. Just like Netrunner, you’re largely aiming to either reduce variance (e.g. making sure you’ve got a lot of stud bullets in a shootout, preferably with some redundancy in case you get hit by bullet reduction) or avoid situations where variance will screw you (e.g. by not getting into shootouts where you have more or lose than your opponent, or by doing a risk/reward analysis in a very similar way to running an advanced card in a scoring server). Sometimes your draws will screw you anyway, though, because it’s a card game. You build and play to minimise it, just like any other card game.

I think the Grifter comments are a bit overblown. You’re not heavily punished by having to boot your Grifter (e.g. Travis, Gina) because they don’t have influence so won’t be contesting deeds anyway. It’s nowhere near as harsh as losing a click on your first turn.

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The point is that you are losing a resource on your first turn, not if the magnitude is the same as a click. You are being penalized for having a bad draw. Mechanics that kick players when they are already down due to RNG at the start of the game is baffling to me as someone enthused by game design.

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The Grifter mechanism is interesting. You get to choose the type of mulligan you get to take. Booting your chump for the first Noon phase deters you from starting that all-in shootout that I (and everyone else I know) struggles with.

The play 1, draw 1 mechanism makes slow openers really bad though.

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Most of the negative comments I read here show that a few people managed to acquire some Doomtown experience but didn’t delve deep enough to comprehend the full picture. I don´t blame you. The rules manual is terrible, the preconstructed decks are terrible and the early play experience is very mixed to say it nicely.

The mulligan mechanic sure is different. Is it punishing? No. A Grifter is just cannon fodder. He doesn’t have influence, he doesn’t have silver bullets. You tap him for your start turn to get the mulligan. There is no rush. No one wraps the game up on turn 1 unless you give him the victory through dumb moves. Mulligan rules are always awkward. I hate the MTG mulligan rules, the old one and the newish upgrade, because there you actually get heavily penalized for a bad draw in a game which depends so much on good draws. On the other hand, I do like that you can mulligan more than one time. I dislike the Doomtown and FFG mulligan rules because you should be able to mulligan more than once, though at one point you have to introduce some kind of penalty.

The most common mistake people make in Doomtown is that they don’t get the winning concept. You play for control points and you play for situations in which you have a low probability of losing. You don’t go for shootouts or a high body count.

Don’t believe me? One of the strongest archetypes are landslide decks which avoid shootouts at all. Same thing goes for hex control decks.

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