A Complete Strategy Guide to the Original Dominion Card Game: 2013

Friday, December 6, 2013

Your First Expansion

You may become bored of the basic Dominion set, due to its simplicity. 25 cards doesn't provide as much variety as I would like for the long term. If you agree, it's time for you to buy an expansion, but which one?

My family and I decided to buy the expansions in the order they were released, hoping for a gradual increase in complexity. We bought Dominion: Intrigue and Dominion: Seaside, the first two expansions¹. After playing with these, I have concluded that they are the best candidates for a new player's first expansion.

If you only plan to buy one expansion for now, you'll have to choose between the earlier release, Intrigue, or the more complex expansion, Seaside. I'll give you a comparison so you can choose wisely.

Intrigue²

Intrigue is all about interaction between players. If you like attack cards, this set is for you. The nastiest of these is Saboteur, which can sometimes make an opponent trash a Province!

Intrigue introduces kingdom cards that fit multiple categories. For example, the Harem is worth two treasure and two victory points. It counts as both a treasure card and a victory card.

Intrigue also allows you to play with more than four players -- if you want this, buy Intrigue first.

Overall, Intrigue is great for casual games with lots of players who want to screw with eachother using attack cards that may or may not be effective. The main weakness of Intrigue is that many of its cards are inconsistent, in my opinion. For example, the Tribute action card gives you a bonus depending on the top two cards of an opponent's deck -- who knows what you'll get? A lot of Intrigue cards are very situational or just plain weak⁴.

Seaside³

If you're ready for complex cards, Seaside is full of them, and most of them can be viable and consistent.

Seaside introduces duration cards, which are action cards that affect your next turn. A simple example would be Merchant Ship, which gives you two treasure on the turn that you play it, and gives you two treasure on your next turn as well.

Seaside also adds action cards that set aside cards in "mats" that are separate from your deck. For example, the Native Village stores the top card of your deck in your native village mat. Later, you may use a Native Village to instead draw all the cards that you've stored on the mat.

Dominion's designer, Donald Vaccarino, says that he did a better job with Seaside than Intrigue⁴, and I agree -- Seaside is better than Intrigue if you want to play strategic games with 2-4 players.

References...

1 n.a. (2012, Aug 7) Dominion Expansions. Retrieved from http://dominiongame.info/category/dominion-expansions/

2 Dominion: Intrigue Game Manual (2009) Dominion: Intrigue. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

3 Dominion: Seaside Game Manual (2009) Kingdom Card Description. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

4 Theory. (2012, Dec 21) Interview with Donald X. Vaccarino, Part II: Dominion. Retrived from http://dominionstrategy.com/2012/12/21/interview-with-donald-x-vaccarino-part-ii-dominion/

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Interview with Olneyce

I contacted Olneyce, the player who won the DominionStrategy.com 2011 championship¹. I emailed him some questions about Dominion, and I found his answers very informative. His insights are below, but first, some terminology:

Engine: An efficient strategy/deck that emphasizes a selection of action cards².
Greening: The act of buying victory points².
Big Money: A strategy that emphasizes treasure cards and victory cards. In extreme, this strategy may ignore action cards entirely².

Q: What are your favorite action cards to use in the basic set?

My favorite card here is probably Laboratory, which stacks very well with itself and sets up the principle of big hands. My other clear favorite is Chapel, which alters games to an extent that almost no other card can manage. I love engines and sleek decks, so it’s no surprise I love this card. And, along the same lines, I am almost always happy to see +Action cards in a kingdom. The humble Village is nice, but Festival is one of my favorite of those. I like the way it gives +Buy, which is sadly rare in the base set, and the Festival/Library combo is one of my favorites. Finally, I also like Moneylender a lot. It’s one of the cleanest trash-for-benefit cards in the game. It isn’t fast enough to dominate many games, but it is a solid opener a lot of the time.

Q: Are there any weak action cards that you think players should avoid?

It’s a truism that no card is always weak; even the worst card can have its moment to shine. That said, some of the cards in the base set offer a stern test of this maxim. Thief is almost never worth buying. In most cases it will help your opponent more than you. Many other cards often fail the Silver test. That is: in most cases you’d be better off simply buying Silver (Chancellor, Bureaucrat, Feast, Remodel, Mine). And Adventurer almost always fails the Gold test. Moat is strong if you’re worried about attacks but [when attacks are absent it] is rarely worth it. And Workshop is usually not worth buying unless you’re using it for Gardens or to speed up a Village/Smithy engine.

Q: How do you figure out when to start buying victory points instead of money or action cards?

This is a great question. Figuring out how to make the transition to green cards is one of the hardest parts of the game. There’s, of course, no hard and fast rule. You need to first assess what sort of game it is. Are you simply racing for Provinces? If so, you’ll want 5 Provinces and will need to have a strong enough deck to still make $8 with some regularity with four Provinces mixed in. If it’s going to be a messy game with lots of Curses, you may be looking to end the game on piles while picking up a few Duchies. In that case, you will probably be less worried about clogging things up. Are you building an engine? If so, green cards will trip you up a lot more than your opponent who is playing a more money-based strategy.

If you have access to +buy cards and can conceivably buy two or more Provinces at once, you can afford to wait much longer. Let your opponent slow down and then swoop in for the victory. Are you pursuing an attack-based strategy? Then you’ll want to maximize the times you can play your attacks, which generally means holding off on switching to green cards.

All that said, here are a few general principles:

In a two-player game, everything is zero-sum. If you get five Provinces, your opponent can only get three. Getting to 5 should be your top priority.
In general, if you are near a reshuffle, wait. That will give you another time through your deck.
Pay attention to your opponent(s). You don’t need to score the ideal number of points; you just need to score enough to win. That might mean greening a bit earlier if you can assure yourself five Provinces without destroying your buying potential. You might limp to the end, but if you can limp ahead then you’ll win.
All things considered, if you’ve got $8 to spend and only one buy, your presumption should probably be to buy a Province. That certainly doesn’t mean ‘always buy it,’ it just means: you ought to have a clear reason why you’re doing something else.
There are very few cases where you should buy Duchies and (especially) Estates until the end-game. Green cards in your deck are a killer.

Q: What are some of the most important concepts for a Dominion player to learn?

Don’t forget to buy money. The base set is not particularly friendly to complex strategies. The action cards simply aren’t powerful enough, and there aren’t enough great combinations. While playing a pure Big Money strategy is almost never ideal, the strongest strategy on many boards will require you to spend on money.
Don’t get too fancy. Playing actions is fun, but victory cards win you the game. You should always compare your planned strategy to the best money-based strategy on the board. Simply buying money and Provinces will get you to four Provinces in about 17 turns. That’s a lot faster than most action-based strategies. Toss in a Smithy and Big Money will get four Provinces in 14 turns. You need to think about how your plans can do better than that.
Pay attention to attacks. This is particularly true in three or four-person games, but is also important in two-player. Witches are must-buy cards in almost any game. Militia is not quite must-buy, but it can massively slow down the people that it’s hitting.
Pay attention to trashing. Moneylender is a nice opener because it gives you the buying power of opening Silver, but clears out your deck a bit. Chapel is a massively powerful opener because it frees you up to construct a tight deck.
If there’s no +Action card on the board, you rarely want more than two or three action cards.
There are only a couple cards that offer +buy in the base set. If your kingdom doesn’t contain any of these, you can build an awesome engine that can spend $20, but find yourself still only buying one Province per turn and losing to your Big Money opponent.
Don’t count on drawing what you need together. Your deck is going to grow over the game but you still only get to start with five cards at a time. No matter how many neat actions you’ve got, you need to match them up in those five cards to get things rolling. This can often doom potentially exciting combos like Village/Smith and Festival/Library.
Beware the sunk-cost fallacy. Sometimes the right move is buying nothing. Often the right move is to spend less than you could spend. Don’t buy Adventurer just because you’ve got $6 to spend, if Laboratory is going to help you more. More generally, while it’s usually wise to stick to your initial strategy rather than changing horses in mid-stream, you have to be willing to occasionally take a risk and adapt even if it means that you wasted a couple early turns.
Get to $5 after the first shuffle. The $5 cards are often much better than the cheaper ones. You might get lucky and start 5/2, but if not, you want to make sure your opening buys will help you buy one of those power cards on the next shuffle.
Watch out for reshuffles. All the cards in play will miss the shuffle if you trigger it mid-turn. This has the potential to ruin several turns if you’re not careful.
Nothing is absolute. These are all guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. Be willing to break them if necessary; just make sure you’ve got a good reason for doing it!

References...

1 Theory. (2011, Jan 30) olneyce: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Champion! Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/2012/01/30/olneyce-2011-dominionstrategy-com-champion/
2 Theory. (2013, Feb 9). Glossary. Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/glossary/

Friday, November 22, 2013

Example Game

I decided to play a game of Dominion online¹ to show you my thought process when playing. If you learn by example, I recommend watching the video of me playing.

References

1 Goko Games. (2013, March). Dominion. Retrieved from http://play.goko.com/Dominion/gameClient.html

How to Count Cards in Dominion by Adib Khoury

This guest article was written by Adib Khoury. He's a board game collector and a senior game-design student at UT Dallas.

Basics
The basic point of this strategy is know how much buying strength you deck has. This is done by keeping track of three values. This technique will take some practice to master, but it is very rewarding if done correctly. (rmcantin)

Card counting helps you choose between action cards to play. It also helps you know when to start discarding copper coins and what cards are needed to balance out your deck.

Buying Power
To count your buying power, simply keep track of the total value of value of coins in your deck.

Do not count the coin value on action cards unless you are confident that they can be played. Action cards are not guaranteed to be played, especially if you draw more than one in a turn. (rmcantin)

Whenever you draw coins from the deck, subtract their value from the total buying power to know how much.

Your goal for the first part of the game is to have a buying power of 6 for each 5 cards in your deck.

Action Power
Action power keeps track of your action count in your deck. Every action counts as a -1. Action cards that give +1 actions count as 0. Action cards that give you +2 actions, like Village and Festival, count as +1 for determining the action power. (rmcantin)

The goal is to keep the number as close to positive as possible, otherwise you will not be able to play your action cards and they will start to slow down your deck.

If your Action power is positive, you should be able to safely include coins on action cards toward the buying power.

Deck Size
Keep track of your total deck size and your current deck size. By keeping track of these two values you can compare them your buying or action power to predict how much gold you will receive next turn.

You don’t have to count buying and action power at the same time. For new players, this could easily become overwhelming, so take it slow. Don’t worry about messing up, because that is part of the game.

References
rmcantin: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/411962/advanced-techniques-card-counting

Friday, November 15, 2013

First Turn Cheat Sheet

I've analyzed all the action cards, but now it's time to see them all in one place. This table will give you a brief summary of the strength of each action card and which cards combine well with eachother. The table will help you to make a quick strategy, but keep in mind that Dominion strategy is a complex subject that can't be contained in one table. Use online research as a starting point, but focus on increasing your own experience and knowledge.

By the way, I call this table a "cheat" for a reason. Before printing this out and taking it to a game, ask your opponents if it's okay to use it.

Name	Terminal?^{1, 2}	My rating (1 to 5)	Combine with
Adventurer	Yes	3	Chapel, Moneylender
Bureaucrat	Yes	2	Gardens
Cellar	No	4	Laboratory
Chancellor	Yes	1	Remodel (to trash Chancellor)
Chapel	Yes	5	Anything but Gardens
Council Room	Yes	3	Militia, Bureaucrat
Feast	Yes	2	Workshop?
Festival	No	4	Library, Chapel
Gardens	N/A	5	Workshop³
Laboratory	No	4	Chapel, Cellar, Labs
Library	Yes	4	Festival, Chapel
Market	No	3	Chapel
Militia	Yes	5	Chapel, Council Room
Mine	Yes	3	Laboratory, Adventurer
Moat	Yes	3	Chapel
Moneylender	Yes	3	Adventurer
Remodel	Yes	4	Throne Room+Chapel³
Smithy	Yes	3	Chapel
Spy	No	2	Laboratory, Chapel
Thief	Yes	2	Chapel, Gardens
Throne Room	N/A	3	Chapel+Remodel³
Village	No	3	Terminals
Witch	Yes	5	Anything, esp. Chapel
Woodcutter	Yes	2	Gardens
Workshop	Yes	4	Gardens³

1 Dominion Game Manual. (2008). Dominion. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

2 Theory. (2013, Feb 9). Glossary. Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/glossary/

3 Kirkwb. (2011, Oct 19). Beginners’ Guide: Dominion. Retrieved from http://www.gamehead.com/article/1271/dominion

Gardens Strategies (ft. Workshop)

Gardens deserves a post of its own because the strategies that focus on it use completely different tactics than what you would see in a game without Gardens. In this post, I'll also cover Workshop because of how it interacts with Gardens.

Gardens

A Gardens strategy focuses on getting lots of Gardens and lots of cards. To do this, you need a cheap source of +buy like Woodcutter, or a card like Thief that lets you gain more cards. Deck efficiency goes out the window -- buy Estates, buy Coppers, buy terminals, buy as many cards as you can!

You can end the game quickly by depleting three supply piles¹. You should aim to deplete the supply of Gardens, the supply of Estates, and the supply of a cheap action card that is useful to you in high numbers.

Workshop

In my experience, a well-played combination of Gardens and Workshops is unbeatable when you play with just the basic set. When you see Workshop and Gardens in the supply, immediately execute the following strategy...

Get two Workshops as quickly as possible² (if you can't afford a Workshop, buy an Estate that turn).
Gain/buy cards with the following priority: Gardens > Workshops > Estates² > Coppers².

The Workshops will almost double the rate that you get cards, increasing the value of Gardens. You will deplete the Gardens, Workshop, and Estate piles², and you or someone else who used this strategy will win.

Workshop has uses outside of Gardens strategies, of course. If you want a big deck, you can use a Workshop to get you several Silver cards over the course of the game. If you plan to use a lot of terminals, you can use Workshop to get some supportive Villages.

Workshop's main weakness is that it doesn't contribute to large buys like Provinces -- it just gives you something useful for later. To be fair, I've bought Provinces just with Silver I got from playing my Workshop every time I drew it.

References...

1 Dominion Game Manual (2008). Dominion. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

2 Kirkwb. (2011, Oct 19). Beginners’ Guide: Dominion. Retrieved from http://www.gamehead.com/article/1271/dominion

Friday, November 8, 2013

Village and Festival: "+2 actions"

Cards that give you +2 actions are known as villages¹, because the most basic card with +2 actions is the Village card. There are only two villages in the basic Dominion set, one of them being Village itself².

Villages give you a surplus of actions – they potentially allow you to play multiple terminals in one turn. There's usually no guarantee that you will draw a village with your terminals, so you should still exercise caution when buying multiple terminals. Make sure to read my post on terminal action cards so that you can appreciate the potential of getting lots of actions from villages.

Village

Village is nice if you need the extra actions. If you don't need the extra actions, a Silver would have been better, unless your deck is so efficient that an extra Silver would just slow you down.

Festival

Festival often competes with Market and Laboratory when you're deciding how to spend your five treasure, but there are situations where Festival really shines.

First of all, it's a village-type card that is quite good even if the extra actions go to waste. It's worth its weight in silver – as long as you have an action available to play Festival, it will give you the same amount of treasure as a Silver card. Add on “+1 buy” and you have no reason to take a Silver card over a Festival, unless you can't afford a Festival or you have a Silver-hungry Adventurer.

Festival is a great way to deal with Thief. Thief will take your Silvers, but not your Festivals.

I like to combine Festivals with a Library. Let's imagine an ideal situation: you draw four Festivals and one Library. After you play your Festivals, you're left with eight treasure, five buys, countless actions, and nothing in your hand but a Library card. You play the Library, and you draw cards until you have seven cards in your hand. Since your hand has nothing in it when you play Library, that's effectively +7 cards! You're likely to buy multiple Provinces in a single turn with such a lucky turn of events.

The above results are easier to achieve with Chapel, because Chapel allows you to eliminate cards that aren't Festivals, Golds, Libraries, and Provinces.

Usually, I build my deck to buy Provinces and maybe Duchies, but the most victory points I have ever earned in a game came from a deck that had absolutely no Provinces or Duchies at the end. Learn more in my next post, where I will talk about the Gardens card, and the strategies that involve it.

References...

1 Theory. (2013, Feb 9). Glossary. Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/glossary/

2 Dominion Game Manual (2008). Dominion. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Throne Room and Non-terminal action cards: “+1 action”

Non-terminal action cards don't deplete your actions¹, so it's usually safe to buy as many non-terminal action cards as you want. This can lead to scenarios where you play a chain of action cards to draw lots of cards and get lots of treasure.

Today, I'll cover the three non-attack action cards that have “+1 action” on them². I'll also include Throne Room, because Throne Room is non-terminal in its own way.

Cellar

This card is very strong if you can draw a lot of cards before using it. Even though Cellar's effectiveness relies on the other cards in your hand, I consider it a safe card to buy.

Laboratory

Even if Laboratory draws two useless victory cards, you can at least be glad that those cards won't hinder your next turn. Labs work very well if you get a lot of them, because you can chain them together. Labs allow you to cycle through your deck faster, as if your deck is smaller and more efficient than it actually is. This brings all the benefits and problems that small decks have -- you can review those in my deck-efficiency post.

Market

Market is very similar to Lab. When Market and Laboratory are both available, you should ask yourself...

Do I want more buys?
Will my deck have mostly good cards in it?

If you want more buys, choose Market over Laboratory until you no longer need more buys. If you think that your deck will suffer from a lot of bad cards such as Curses, avoid Laboratory unless you've figured out a way to execute a high-efficiency strategy. When in doubt, choose Laboratory over Market – in my experience, an extra card is usually better than an extra treasure.

Throne Room

Throne Room doesn't replenish your actions, but it allows you to play another action card twice, so it's only terminal if you use it on a terminal action card. Conversely, if you use Throne Room on a non-terminal card, you'll have a surplus of actions. Throne Room is completely useless if you don't draw an action card to use Throne Room on, so think carefully before buying it. Note that Throne Room doesn't work optimally if used on Militia, because Militia will never bring a player's hand below 3 cards², no matter how many times it's played in a turn.

Some cards give you not one, but two actions². I'll save those for my next post.

References...

1 Theory. (2013, Feb 9). Glossary. Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/glossary/

2 Dominion Game Manual (2008). Dominion. Rio Grande Games, Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Friday, November 1, 2013

Attack Cards

It's important to know which attacks are powerful and which ones rely on luck to be worthwhile. It's also important to prepare for your opponents' attacks.

Bureaucrat

How good is it?

The attack is only effective if the leading opponent happens to have a victory card in-hand when you play Bureaucrat. The silver you get is nice for a big deck.