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

Copyright 2013 M. Stith

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

Copyright 2013 M. Stith

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.