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Posted - Edited
Falco -- if you join the discord in Arnaud's signature we might be able to help. We're good at finding fonts.
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That's a great idea! I would love to get a peek at the expansion rules before they arrive.
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I super appreciate you sticking with it, by the way! Thanks so much for helping!
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The bottom-left one does not have a number. It is the one some people think is supposed to be the 0, but actually it doesn't have a number at all.
It's actually the front of the card whose ![]() #3 is in the middle right. It is the subtlest of the numbers right now, tucked away in the curls of the lava. One good strategy might be to sorta play a run and just like cheat as much as you want not drawing cards on things, explore to the various locations, see if anything sparks. Posted - Edited
None of these guesses is quite right but they are very close. This is definitely the kind of thinking you need to solve this puzzle.
I advise having the physical cards to solve this puzzle but you needn't examine them under a microscope or anything. The hidden number is currently only 3 digits. I could rework it to make it 4 pretty easily and I actually probably should just so I can put it on a less conspicuous card. I assume #0 you mean the bottom-left one that doesn't have a number? That one isn't part of the hidden number puzzle, but i've been convinced to add an actual #0 map to the puzzle, if I don't decide to take the numbers off of the maps where they're just a red herring. Posted
It occurs to me that I was not very specific about what I mean by a Hidden Number.
The 9 maps with digits are all the same ![]() Imagine you have all 9 of those. The 10th map in the bottom right is not a part of this puzzle and you can forget it exists for now. It is not a ![]() So, you've collected all the map fragments, and they have numbers on them. Numbers are always suspicious in the 7th continent, usually they can be combined in some way for a ![]() Somewhere in the adventure deck, there is a card with a ![]() ![]() Posted
Found another couple of small things missing:
![]() This banner, used as a background for resource symbols in text boxes ![]() The version of this background used by item cards with no keyword, like this one. Indeed, the version we do have is called like Adventure_Item_Keyword... Posted - Edited
![]() Right click -> view image to make this bigger. These are minor treasure maps from my upcoming fan expansion. Please take a second and help me by answering these questions: Which of these terrain cards do you think you could you find? If it isn’t all ten, next time you play, keep an eye out for the last few. Can you find them then, or are my drawings just unrecognizeable? What is the solution to the hidden number puzzle? If you can’t solve the hidden number puzzle, do you have any theories as to how it might work? The location that doesn't have a number actually doesn't have one, it has a slightly different purpose, there is not (yet) a 0. The best way to answer is just to post your best guess for the 10 locations and the hidden number in spoiler tags. Posted - Edited
Just a note: The discord link just got changed, by mistake I think. I updated the OP, but if you posted the old link anywhere, update it!
Also, we've just undergone a pretty significant reorganization, -- you can choose whether you want to see English channels, French channels, or both, and we finally have some dedicated channels for both languages. Posted - Edited
How so?
A new player doesn't know what plants can be found where, so they're a little more likely to use this ability to use plants that they could use for free somewhere nearby, I suppose in that sense it would be better for a less-informed player. Is that what you mean? Other than that, I don't really see how her ability has more use from a new player. I was pretty new when I was playing Keelan. As a "veteran" I pretty much play Lovecraft or Frankenstein unless I'm looking for variety. Not knowing what botany cards might exist doesn't make any of the actual botany cards any better. Most of them still aren't really worth a card. New players get to hold out hope for better Botany cards, but by and large they don't find them -- they find a lot of small things that aren't really worth Keelan's cost, and some things like the Poison resource that occasionally are worth the cost but are still pretty small. You do eventually find one winner. The card that lets you swap a card from your hand with a card from the action deck is theoretically incredibly strong, easily the best Botany card, and Scholar makes it free and guaranteed. That's really fantastically abusable, to the point that I've seen some house rules that nerf that botany card. You can build any item you want, you can pull all the half stars out of the deck before an important check, you can pick Valiant Hearts and all 3 Remembers out of the deck after every heal, use Valiant Hearts instead of drawing cards on checks, and eat a piece of food when you run out of Remembers, return to the fire you lit on a Terracokus, and do it all again. You can do anything. Discarding vigilance cards to use this ability is a lot worse than using it to to freely sculpt your hand at an actual Terracokus, of course, but Terracokus don't grow everywhere. I could imagine a new player becoming very reliant on that ability. What I've actually seen, though, is, new players just don't use it because they don't know what to search for -- the options are just overwhelming. I myself basically never use that card, Keelan or no. It makes the game very easy at the expense of making it very boring. You spend much of your time doing repetitive action deck manipulation, so your progress is very slow, even if it is very safe and very consistent. I don't think I need it, as a veteran, and as a new player I didn't really know how to use it. So, the thing I've used most is the fire starter, but that is the most powerful option. Perhaps that option is more important for new players? Anyway, my house rule does a few things, for both new and veteran players. -It fixes the vaguely nightmarish timing of the old ability, which is technically still an open question: https://the7thcontinent.seriouspoulp.com/en/forum/topic/3951/can-frankenstein-get-a-card-back-in-the-middle-of-a-check/ -It lets Keelan start using her ability as soon as she gets her first Botany card, instead of having to collect one of each plant to open up her options. You never have to choose between a new plant and a botany card that does something useful. -It means Keelan can use her Botany cards when there are no plants, instead of just when you can't find a plant, which is useful to veterans and new players alike. New players who don't know where all the plants are benefit when they can't find one, Veteran players benefit from being able to use it where there truly are no plants. -It lets you get unlimited uses from abilities that you expect to have unlimited uses, like the search-your-deck and the gourmet, making those abilities much more viable to use with Keelan's ability. -It lets you use abilities that are only useful on very specific spaces on spaces with no plants, instead of just spaces with the right kind of check and the wrong plant, which are very rare. Most of the places you can use things like the Fragonia ![]() ![]() -It lets you use multiple abilities that are not worth a card individually, making them much more viable to use with her ability. -Basically, paying a cost to use a botany ability a single time seems (and is) a lot worse than just finding the right plant, and because it's restricted to more or less random subset of spaces, you often don't get to use it even when a situation comes up where you might want it. This removes that restriction, so you can always use it when you see an opportunity to do so, and when you pay the cost, you get something a little better than finding a plant, instead of a little worse. Instead of being promising but frequently disappointing, it's just, good. Every other character's ability is pretty much "just good" I think, it's weird that hers is so incredibly conditional. -Perhaps most important of all, it makes her look at the Botany pile differently. Theoretically, the Botany pile should be sort of a part of Keelan. Her ability is supposed to give her a special relationship with it, in sort of the same way that Lovecraft has a special relationship with curses. "Botany cards are better if Keelan's here" should be something obviously and unshakably true. Right now it kinda isn't -- her ability comes up pretty rarely and provides only a small benefit when it does. "Botany cards are better if Keelan's here, AND we have a botany card that would be useful, AND there's a plant here, AND it's not the right plant for that botany card, AND we have another botany card that refers to that plant, AND she has vigilance card ready to discard, AND we don't forget about her ability, which probably wouldn't happen if we got to use it more often" Outside of that, a few of them use ![]() There's a decent chance it over-buffs the ability, actually. In general I think it's better to have characters that feel good about their most unique abilities, and whose abilities all mesh together into a cohesive whole, characters whose abilities get better as you discover new uses and interactions between them, instead of frustrating abilities that seem to get worse as you discover their limitations. So, that's my justification for buffing her when she's already a high-tier character, such as it is. But nobody could be blamed for thinking it's too much, and even I might think that after playtesting. Posted - Edited - Moved
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Firebird wrote:
I don't actually think that would be that great. Starting with all the notes is pretty strong obviously, but Keelan isn't the character you want for it. Keelan's biggest strength is how good she is at collecting the Notes. She has Study the Notes, which literally only does that job and is a blank card once you run out of 050s, and she has both Scholar and Herbal Mixture whose biggest benefit is to make Examine the Notes free + guaranteed. Those remain somewhat useful for other things if you have all the Notes, but the ![]() She gets maximum use out of her character ability if she has all the notes, but I'm pretty sure her character ability is bad. The vast majority of botany abilities are very small bonuses that aren't usually worth discarding a card for. Plants are placed so their botany cards will be useful. Fragonia has a lot of relevance to ![]() A few botany abilities, like those that drop states or provide crafting resources, are good but not time-sensitive. Discarding a card to cure poison if you don't have access to the right plant isn't too high a cost, but most of the time you can just wait for the plant that lets you cure it for free. Most plants grow in most places, after all. Many of the areas where plants are scarce (undergound) have no plants at all. Some botany abilities, like the gourmet one, have to be activated several times in a row. You have to discard 1 vigilance card per activation, and you'll never have enough. Vigilance is a super mediocre keyword to begin with, probably the second-worst after Stealth, so she doesn't get that much out of using it to keep her Vigilance stack healthy the way Lovecraft can keep a Walking Stick forever with his ability. Between all these things I wanna say I've used Keelan's ability like 3 times in the 10+ hours I've played with her, mostly to light fires. (This includes a run where I literally got every 050, so I know from experience how much worse she feels once you run out of new 050s.) I've actually thought about house ruling it to be: You may discard a card with the vigilance keyword to take the following action: 0 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Until you leave this terrain card, you may use effects on cards with the botany keyword regardless of what appears on your terrain card. Keelan doesn't really need any buffs, Scholar alone makes her above-average I think. But it drives me crazy that her character ability -- which at best would be no stronger than the Botany cards, which aren't huge bonuses -- has anti-synergies that make it barely work with most of the better Botany cards. This house rule would make her ability live up to it's promise of "use your Botany cards wherever, for a small cost", which I think is a pretty humble promise for it not to live up to in the first place. Posted
When an adventure item (not on an action card, that is) leaves your inventory, it goes to the Past.
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Wow, you actually overflowed an int? Exponents get big, man.
Anyway there's an active thread on BGG about exactly this problem. Including the interesting observation that the goat chart's odds, at least for 1 ![]() ![]() https://boardgamegeek.com/article/31076659#31076659 Posted
Because it's a monte carlo simulator, I can never say with 100% certainty that something is possible or impossible. I can only say if it happened or not in this random set of data. Technically speaking, I don't know if it could happen or not.
Figuring out the best and worst possible result from a given size draw for a given deck doesn't seem like a hard problem to do separately, but, right now it isn't one that I'm doing. Until I do that, 100% won't mean it can't fail, just that it went ~100,000 shuffles without failing. You occasionally see a 0% or 100% that's a slightly off-shade, that's actually a 0.000001-0.5% or a 99.5-99.99999%. The color spectrum doesn't have any rounding. I think you're right though, that if there's even 1 pass it should round up to 1% and if there's even one fail it should round down to 99%. That'd also get rid of those off-color 0s and 100s. Posted - Edited
Nothing ever gets done quite as fast as I want it to but here's some progress.
Github as promised, late as usual: https://github.com/brisingre/TheSeventhCalculator ![]() Rederived the goat table by monte carlo estimation. These numbers are for a 2-player 1-curse run, with no advanced skills in the deck. Not sure if the slight differences between this table and the one in the rulebook are - the randomness of the monte carlo estimation (there's always some degree of error, and for values sufficiently close to 0.5 it can make the difference in which way they round. Running more simulations reduces but does not eliminate this error, at the cost of calculations taking longer.) - stylistic choices in the table in the rulebook (they round everything down to 99% to show that you can technically fail almost anything. I just do whatever C#'s default rounding behavior is) -small errors in the table in the rulebook (I know nothing about how it was derived and rounded, so I just have to trust their math) - slight differences in the number of players used to calculate (the rulebook says it doesn't make a difference but it makes at least a small one I think) - some tiny pernicious bug in my star counting code that makes it sometimes off by 1% or so. ![]() This is the difference one ![]() ![]() This is the impact of Lovecraft's curse ability. It's a little worse than mary's in terms of raw odd when you need lots of successes from few cards and a little better when you need only a few successes from a lot of cards, which sort of makes sense-- hers makes cards that already have stars better, so you're more likely to get a few in a small space. His makes the worst cards better, so it's doing the most work when all you're worrying about is drawing a bunch of curses. It kinda makes sense. Of course, draw odds doesn't accurately depict the power gulf between those two abilities, because you use Mary's before you draw and Lovecraft's after you see if it's going to work... Posted
Of course!
I'll put the code on github tonight and post the exe here and on bgg once it's a little more usable. There's a lot I still want to do... Posted
I've begun work on an odds calculator program for The Seventh Continent.
A WIP of the distribution screen: ![]() Posted
I know you say brute force seems like cheating, but I think this problem is a perfect candidate for monte carlo estimation.
The actual probability calculations to solve this problem are way beyond me, but I could whip up a program to simulate a deck of 7C cards and draw a thousand sample results a second in just a few hours. Perhaps I will attempt that today. For the general use of anyone trying this kind of problem, some very useful information: Distribution of basic actions: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Distribution of a character kit (this is the same for all characters, so you can multiply this by the party size): ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Distribution of advanced skills in the base game: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Posted
colin wrote: hmm... in my opinion it´s useless for the active player in your example. further, the bamboo armour is a character specific ability, one out of five. it´s generally not allowed, that you use specific abilities from other characters. f.e. the The only restriction on character-specific cards is that only that character can have them in their hand. This implies some other restrictions -- only you can use cards in your hand, so you're always the active player on your white-box actions. Consequences of actions that don't specify who the target target the active player, so if, say, a state-dropper doesn't say "one involved character" or something it only works on you. But brown-box effects work for any action you're involved in, even if you're not active, and critically, as arnaud points out, items can be built to any involved character, and traded between characters. There is no restriction on having another player's character cards in your inventory, only your hand. Anyway, there's an advanced skill, Shield, that does pretty much the same thing. It's not just bamboo armor that does this. So we can forget about answers that depend on the fact that bamboo armor is a Dmitri card, I think. In general, if something doesn't say who it affects, the default is to affect the active player. A case could be made by that logic that armor and shield affect the active player, regardless of who uses them. There is not a similar default for cards affecting the person who controls or plays the card as far as I know. It sort of feels like there is, because only you can initiate actions on cards in your hand or inventory, which makes you the active player, which means that default targeting of the active player targets you on your own cards, but I don't think it goes any farther than that in the rules as written. Cards can explicitly target the player whose hand or inventory they're in by using the words "you" and "your." This seems to be the normal way of making cards target their owner outside of actions, for passive abilities like the ones that kill companions if you get the wrong state. Between this and being the active player, we are very very used to effects from our hands and inventory self-targetting. But it isn't just an automatic thing that happens. But this is all assuming Prevent has to target a character, and I don't think there's a single instance where Prevent has an explicit target like that. There's only one other Prevent that I know of, the Lucky advanced skill, also just says prevent without a target. I've assumed it self-targets in the past (when glancing at it before throwing it back in the advanced skill deck) because blue cards usually self-target, but under a technical reading, if it targets at all, it must target the active player. But I don't think Prevent does target a player. I think Prevent is it's own thing. The actual question is what the fuck is Prevent. I don't think there's any mention of Prevent effects in the rulebook at all. We don't know how it works. There's a variety of ways you could think about it. -Preventing states happens as soon as you choose to activate the ability on the item. If one or more states are being prevented, the action can't give anyone those states, no matter what. They just don't happen. -Prevent effects wait until a state of the right name happens, and then they prevent it. They prevent exactly one state card, on anybody, whoever takes one first. -Prevent is like any other thing that targets a character. It could say "prevent all involved characters from getting injured" or "prevent any one involved character from getting injured." In the absence of a specific target, it will target the active player. -Bamboo armor is a suit of armor. It protects the guy wearing it, not everybody else who happens to have fallen off the same cliff as him. So unless something says otherwise, prevent always means "prevent yourself". Unlike most other things, if you wanted to prevent the active player taking a state, you have to say "prevent the active player", which never actually happens. Prevent is only on blue cards, blue cards usually self-target, so Prevent self-targetting kind of makes sense even if it isn't in the rules anywhere. Maybe they just forgot it. -You can easily imagine compound variations of these. Maybe it shields you, maybe it shields the active player, maybe it shields everybody. Maybe it only blocks the first state card, maybe it works for the whole action. Maybe there actually are rules for Prevent i missed, too. If anybody has a rulebook reference for it let me know please. |