During that time, I’ve tried to pay close attention to the language I use and that other people use and find other words that may or may not have accepted meanings and try to adjust the way I talk about Dominion to be clearer. I made a second poll asking about three terms, and the results are in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let me be clear, this is not an attempt to shape the way that others talk about the game, but rather an exercise for me to hone my ability to be understood by everyone who reads or listens to my content. If that’s not a priority for other people, it’s certainly not my place to tell them not to use certain words. The only reasons I’m publishing my findings in this article are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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- I feel like I owe it to the people who kindly filled out the survey to show them that it wasn’t for nothing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- There has been some interest in the results.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
If you don’t like the data, well sorry, it’s just data. If you don’t like my conclusions or interpretations of the data, you’re entitled to disagree. In fact I’ve had many constructive conversations in the past about the “engine” survey from people who disagreed, and that has shaped the way I now talk about the game. I’m hoping the same thing happens here, and I believe the process has already started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let’s get to the results and see what we can learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThis survey asked three questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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- What does “swingy” mean in Dominion?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- What does “cycling” mean in Dominion?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- What makes a card\/event\/project\/etc. “good” or “strong” in Dominion?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
I’ll address each question separately, but I’ll start by linking the raw data spreadsheet<\/a> and posting the composite image of the results before going into more detail. The survey had about 40 responses for each question, and every response that appeared more than once got a category that can be seen in the image below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/adamhorton.com\/flog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screenshot-from-2019-01-28-13-05-50.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n“Swingy”<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This is a word that has been used in many different contexts throughout a few different games. I had an idea of a few different ways it could apply to Dominion and I had heard a few different things, but I wanted to see what people really meant by “swingy” when they were talking about Dominion. The results were actually more unified than I thought they would be, and there is a narrative to how a few terms fit together here that seems to be clear enough and somewhat educational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A majority of the responses referenced two main concepts. First, that swingy cards had a component of luck, or some factor outside of the player’s control; and second, that the difference in outcomes between the best result and the worst result, based on this luck component, was large. So a swingy card could be great or awful for you (or anywhere in between), and you won’t know which it is until you’ve invested some resources into buying and playing the card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are two other responses on the list. “Powerful” may have originally referenced other games where swingy cards could provide turns where a player who was behind could “swing” the game into their favor, but in Dominion it stands to reason that any card that doesn’t at least have the potential upside of being very powerful for its best outcomes won’t be such a large force on the game, even if it is swingy as referenced by the other definitions above. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also stands to reason that if powerful cards have large random effects, that it could result in luck determining more of the outcome of the game than normal, as opposed to skill. While this is a logical consequence of the rest of these categories, the fact that it isn’t well-represented in this poll is probably because I see this more commonly referred to as “high luck” or “low skill” cards rather than “swingy” cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, there are metrics that can be used to measure the skill component of card over a large set of games — you simply see how well the leaderboard could predict the winner of a given game of Dominion, and see which cards are involved more often when the game result doesn’t match what the leaderboard predicts. Current data from online games has been used to calculate this, but unfortunately due to a technical limitation of the online client, only games including players from the very top of the leaderboard (a small fraction of the total games played online) have their games included in this data, and the bias in this data calls the accuracy of these statistics into question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as far as “swingy” goes, it seems we at least have a narrative here and some language that can be understood by just about everyone without too much confusion. Hooray!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Cycling”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Going into this I had my own way of looking at cycling — we had done a podcast episode where we labeled “cycling” as something specific — anything that helps you play your best cards more often — but of course it wasn’t a universally accepted term. I wanted to get some hard data on what people think of when they think of cycling, even though I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My expectation was that in most peoples’ minds, cycling was tied to the effect of moving cards from your deck to your discard, which is equivalent to shuffling more often, and indeed the data supports this with 3 out of every 4 answers specifically mentioning this effect. It’s not that I’m terribly surprised to see this, but it does mean a few things to me personally, in that it will probably affect the way I speak about these ideas moving forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason I wanted to use “cycling” to mean what I had was because I found it more educational to focus more on the “why” rather than the “what” of the matter. There have been discussions around what constitutes “good cycling” and “bad cycling” and I’ve seen these concepts cause confusion in people who can easily lose focus on the overall goal. It’s similar to my issues with the way “PPR” is presented. Memorizing effects and lists of situations\/exceptions where those effects can be good or bad is not a good way to internalize a concept; explaining the goal and inviting the listener\/reader to take in the situation and figure out the answer for themselves is not only a more approachable concept, but it’s more directly relevant to real games of Dominion, so it’s not surprising how much success I’ve had using this method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Given this data, though, it seems that I can do better in clarifying my message by using a word other than “cycling” to get my point across. It seems that within the Dominion community, the definition of “cycling” is standardized to the point where trying to assign a different viewpoint or definition to the conversation around that word can potentially be more difficult than it has to be. On top of that, other card games use “cycle” or similar things as keywords, which have a somewhat easy analog to this concept in Dominion of shuffling more often, so I think it’s best to try not to step on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The solution for me is to find another term to use for this concept. While I haven’t figured out exactly what it should be yet, once I find that term it should be clearer what I’m talking about, which is the real goal here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Good” or “Strong”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n