DaviddesJ wrote:
Dearlove wrote:
And that's despite the point that whether you've won a game is completely missing the point. To argue otherwise would suggest there's skilled play that overcomes the handicap. Which would be ... ?
I think the point is that once you've played enough to win the game you know whether you like it, and whether you're willing to play a game in which you sometimes get bad draws. But a handicap for new players, particularly one that increases flexibility, is a way to avoid the problem of people having one frustrating experience in their first game and never seeing the things about the game that they might enjoy more.
Right, exactly. It's a unit because dealing with units is already in the rules, and it's named the Bumbling Fool because that name came up in another thread and I noticed it's how I frame myself when first playing a new complex game. It increases Influence so you don't feel bad about "wasting" it by not using its Move and because there are only 3+ Influence cards in the deck compared to 4+++ fighting cards. It goes away after you win a game because that's how I teach Dominion to new players - they start with 3 Estates, 6 Coppers, and 1 Gold until they win a game - and that seems to work very well to avoid "I'm/my luck is so terrible at this game it sucks" syndrome.
I'm not trying to fix the problem of bad starts, I'm trying to fix the problem of anchoring on bad starts while new.