Free choice extension on rainbow variants

[mmelwen]

Many times you dont have the free choice to use the color a multi card was touched with, when this is the case with our current conventions everything is a prompt, I believe we can do better if we have at least 2 colors available.

I am proposing the left color to be the finesse position and the right one to be the prompt

in this game wump's cards have been clued blue or multi so because we cannot clue blue to Time everything wrong prompts, with my proposal red is a finesse so wump plays slot 1 and everything else promps slot 3

Here rkass was clued green and my proposal is that again red is a finesse where yellow or blue on Time prompts

[sephirothx]

100% agree with this

I would like to add some generalization to it

Rainbow 1 is on the stack, A is the one giving the clue, B has 2 promptable rainbow cards and C has the Rainbow 3. A has a free choice among 3 colors to clue the Rainbow 3. Cluing with the leftmost color should prompt the first promptable card, the second color should prompt the second promptable card and the third color should make B play his finesse position.

In general:

• if B has N promptable cards and A can give the clue with free choice among N colors, A can prompt any of those cards
• if B has N promptable cards and A can give the clue with free choice among N + 1 colors, A can prompt any of those cards or make B play finesse

[Zamiell]

sep, use their names, letters are difficult to parse, which makes reading your post annoying

[Zamiell]

mel, i think you did the proposal backwards. sep has the right idea such that the left-most thing should be the default thing. other than that, good idea.

[mmelwen]

seph wants it more general I believe, I was thinking only the leftmost prompt and the finesse but I like seph's idea.
I believe that we should have the leftmost available for the finesse and then the prompts, to match the order of the cards on the hand I find this easier in practice, but what you are saying is making sense since if we have only 1 available clue then is prompting the leftmost clued. In practice I believe that two most important slots are the left one and then the finesse and then the other prompts.

[mmelwen]

[mmelwen]

so in the image above o2 and m4 have a red clue on them and we cannot clue red but we have the color choices Blue, Green and the rank choice 2 the rank choice could follow the rank choice bluff convention so is for clot 1 the default blue should be slot 3 and the bad green clue could be slot 4

[waweiwoowu]

I don't think it's a very good convention.

• For example:
  • All the 2's are played on the stacks except red 2.
  • Bob has a rainbow 3 which is either on Finesse Position or has been clued.
  • Cathy has a yellow 3 and a rainbow 4 which were touched by rank clues.
  • Now Alice wants to Prompt/Finesse the rainbow card and she has Free Choice between red and blue.
  • In your proposal, red means a Finesse while blue means a Prompt. However, in this situation, red is slightly better since it also put negative red information on the yellow 3.

[mmelwen]

Jeff I don’t follow your logic, currently you can only prompt or finesse with both clues now you have the extra choice to give a slightly worse clue and get a card you couldn't get with a 2 for 1 instead for a 1-1 on finesse, how this can be worst? Furthermore, I really don’t think that the best clue and the worst clue can be defined, suboptimal finesse it fails often because of different opinions so is better to have standard positions known to everyone. As for conventions my opinion is that it will always be a counterexample that it would be better not to have the convention, what we have to figure out is statistically better. All conventions in games are like that, let’s take the bluffs, we can give examples (especially in 3p) that the existence of the 3 bluff takes away a nice layered finesse. Does it matter? No because we save so many 1-away cards in the long run that it makes it worth it.

Like in here the question is, “is it worth it to be able to get different slots with different colors?” or “is it always better to prompt the same card” not in 1 example but in the long terms. For example, If have a m5 clued as multi then you can never finesse a multi card. For me, that looks more often than your example. Cheers 😊

[Zamiell]

jeff is basically outlining the reason that we didn't already have this convention of years and years of playing rainbow variants, e.g. sometimes it is nice to let players just choose the color they want without anything special happening

does anyone else besides mel/sep/jeff care one way or the other?

[Jayhui-q]

I tend to agree with Jeff here about the value of negative information. I love being able to pick what color to give so as to give the most useful negative info.

However, I see the value of negative info dropping substantially if the clued player has no clued cards. I really like this convention in this case so perhaps that could be an addendum to it?

[Zamiell]

while i see the benefit in sep's proposal, i also don't want to make things more complicated. it is an anti-goal to squeeze every last bit of efficiency from the conventions, especially if it will cause misunderstandings and bombs.

[Zamiell]

/deny

[conventions-bot[bot]]

• Some time has passed since this issue was opened and the group appears to have reached a consensus.
• ❌ This change will not be integrated into the official reference document.
• This issue will now be closed. If you feel this was an error, feel free to continue the discussion and a moderator will re-open the issue.

(For more information on how consensus is determined, please read the Convention Changes document.)