I’ve never thought about it, but my assumption has always been the two cards you’re offered are random, and the one you don’t pick is discarded. Which isn’t to say that the same card may not come up again later, but if it does, it was because it was generated at random, and not because it was one you discarded previously.
I have zero evidence that this is the case, just that it’s what I’ve always assumed, so when I pick a card, it’s solely based on which one is most beneficial at that moment.
Okay. And that’s how I usually roll, and it seems like I’ve often passed on, like, a church because I’ve already got one on each island, and it’s never forced me to build a third. So I think that’s right. I’ve just heard the comment that playing it a second time gives you more “familiarity with the deck,” and I started to wonder if there was some consistency that I hadn’t noticed.
I think the “familiarity with the deck” comment refers specifically to the daily, where presumably the two cards offered each turn are the same for everyone, thus being able to compete for high scores given the same cards. So repeated runs of the daily will allow you to know what’s coming up in future turns.
The random shuffle isn’t something that would work with, obviously.
Oh sure, and I get that. I have attempted the daily more than once a few times, but I’ve never felt like the second time I had a much better idea what was coming than I did the first time. :-)
I guess if I tried it 6 or 7 times I would eventually catch on. ;-)
The question I have is whether for dailies and randoms the deck of options is identical. I.e., Are there the same number of mountains, churches, etc. in every game, and same with the placement cards (rows, columns, and squares). Seems like shuffling those up would still provide enough variability. But I haven’t bothered to try counting.
My assumption has always been that everyone gets the same choices for dailies. But then, I never knew if a draw you got later on was determined by what you selected early – ie, is your 15th draw the choices you didn’t pick from 1 and 2? I don’t THINK so, at this point, but I’ve never been sure.
Yeah, I presume the Daily is the same cards shuffled the same way every time. But my question is whether every game of any kind has the exact same deck contents and the only thing that’s different is the shuffle.
57 here today. Womp womp.
I think it’s different each day. Some days I definitely see more churches than others. I can’t say for sure about anything else though.
Not sure the womp womp is warranted. I feel like 57 is a pretty decent score ever since the scoring changes, hehe.
63 today, to my surprise. It was a bit touch and go early on, I was less than impressed with my choices, but managed to turn it around near the end.
Incredibly unlucky on the waves. Immediately after placing my first wave, I was given two identical cards of waves in the same column in which I’d just placed that wave, killing off 4 points. Bummer.
I performed some SCIENCE! on Tiny Islands, and here are some things I learned that you might be interested in!
You get dealt 52 pairs of cards (each pair is a terrain type paired with a location range): 18 pairs before the first island-drawing. 18 pairs before the second island-drawing. And 16 pairs before the last island drawing. All that is evident if you pay attention as you play, but I admit I hadn’t really looked that closely myself.
Here’s the not-obvious stuff, which I learned from writing down all the cards I was dealt across 6 games.
The cards you receive during a game are shuffled and dealt from a terrain deck and a location deck of 54 cards each.
It’s easy to grok the location range cards: There are two copies each of the nine rows, nine columns, and nine squares where terrain can be placed. So in a given game, two of those 54 cards are effectively thrown out and not dealt to you.
The terrain deck appears to have these contents:
Boats: 3
Waves: 9
Beaches: 9
Houses: 10
Churches: 5
Forests: 13
Mountains: 5
That’s a total also of 54 cards.
Further research could reveal that the terrain deck is larger than 54, but the amount of variability is usually very small, so I think the chance is high that, like locations, it takes a deck of 54 and throws out two cards and shuffles what’s left.
So the set of cards you get in any given game (daily or random) is not identical, but it doesn’t vary much.
what does 9 waves mean? There are only 9 positions for the ways? or you get 9 waves dealt, but any wave can occupy 1 of the 81 spots?
so the number of terrain types is pretty much fixed, but the positions are endless?
Think of it more like a ‘card’ is a combination of two different cards drawn separately and then combined. There are 9 cards in the feature deck that just specify Wave. When one of those is drawn, then a card is drawn from the location deck - so that wave could have 9 different locations.
It would actually take a lot of cards to equal the number of combinations possible with the way it is set up - but I’m too lazy to try to work the number out.
edit: I kind of take that back - if the deck were really enough cards to equal all the feature-location combinations, an individual game could get no waves, for example. The double-draw reduces variability a lot.
But it still boils down to “only place a wave, boat or beach if you don’t have any better option”.
got it, thanks!
