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Comment by pcmaffey | Hacker News Reader

I just played my first game of Dominion (2nd edition) with my wife last night. Really fun, except, coming from MtG, it became obvious to me to build an engine with +cards and +actions. My last 2 hands I cycled through my entire deck multiple times until I played basically every card. This seemed a bit tedious, overpowered, and easily achievable. Having only played 1 game though, I'm not sure: is this how almost all games are won?

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You can’t cycle your deck multiple times per turn, iirc the discards don’t happen until after the turn ends.

Aside from that, it’s definitely not the only or best strategy. Buying gold early can usually edge it out, and it’s very vulnerable to curses.

I got into dominion at the start of the first lockdown and have played close to 400 games since, the one thing that helped me improve was remember a Big Money or Big Money/+Cards deck normally wins in 14-17 turns so any strategy you choose should beat that time.

Not necessarily "any strategy" - if you have interactive kingdoms it may be better to slow your opponent down (feed them curses, feed them junk, make them discard,outpace their Province/Duchy-driven victory points via alternate victory cards, etc). In "engine vs big money" or "engine dittos", you are totally correct in that you need to have the superior engine.

Yes, except as beginners, you probably bought a lot more cards for your engine than you actually needed: at some point you’ll need to decide to start greening rather than buying actions. While blowout games are easy at first, optimization and learning the balance of money vs actions will start trimming turns off your games.

Another factor is that with experience, your opponent will either recognize what you’re doing and defend by buying the cards you’re wanting, or get their own engine going to beat you if they learn from their mistakes.

Most games are won by buying out the provinces, yes, but the three stacks win is there for a reason and is great for catching opponents off guard when the kingdom’s right.

The strategy comes in the race to achieve points before the game ends. It turns out that buying lots of cards and building a massive engine on a whim may not be more efficient than just buying silvers/golds/provinces all the time. There are lots of subtleties in the timing of purchases, and determining ways to create a slightly more efficient machine than your opponent.

IMO it's an terrific 1-on-1 game where meaningful strategic and tactical decisions are made, but I find the game a lot more "fun" with three or four players (five players takes way too long)

I've only played a hundred or two games, but my answer is not really. You're in a race to get enough victory point cards before they poison your deck into impotence. An action combo uses more money and buys to get online than a handful of gold, and is more succecptible to be poisoned by green. Missing even one turn to a bad hand hurts a lot, in about half of my most recent games the winner was decided by turn order (they went first so they grabbed the last province on turn 14, when another player who only had 13 turns was ready to buy that province).

No. Engine decks are of course a lot more fun than big money decks, but they often are too slow to build and lose to them. You’ll learn that as you get better.

Most players start off playing big money too much, move into playing engines too much, and then move back toward simpler strategies more often.

Some boards don’t even really have a good engine available, usually for lack of +actions.

For a high-level answer to that question, see https://dominionstrategy.com/2013/01/21/the-five-fundamental... (by the same author as the original article). You won with an "Engine" deck type, which is common, but certainly not always optimal.

These engine build are certainly the most fun strategy. There are all these cards available so you want use them.

The baseline strategy however: Only buy province, gold, or silver. You might be surprised how strong it is. It is also boring if you play with friends though.

The correct strategy for a game is entirely dependent on the kingdom.

You can't cycle through your deck multiple times in a single turn (barring the existence of sifting cards which given this was your first game I assume not) so you were probably playing a rule wrong.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to build efficient full deck draw engines I will bet big money as a beginner that you took wayyyyyyy too long to build an execute your engine.

Our group played tonight for the first time too!

Not sure what you mean by cycled through your deck multiple times, but if you meant all in 1 turn, then you definitely didn't play correctly.

Any action cards that are played are put in the play area, and aren't moved into the discard pile until the Cleanup phase. Also, the Buy phase only starts after the Action phase has ended. ABC (Action, Buy, Cleanup).

Once you've drawn your entire deck and need to draw more, then the discard pile is shuffled to form a new deck. Once that's drawn too you'll be left with an empty deck, no discard pile, and the rest of the cards left in either your hand or playing area.

Did you win when you did that? The strategy varies quite a lot between instances of the game, but often I find that those kinds of “engines” happen too late in the game to really be valuable, and by then someone might have bought gold and provinces.

The typical length of a game varies with the number of players. It sounds like their first game was with 2 players and like you typically are in larger groups?

I would definitely say that engines do better heads up in general than they do with more players.

There's a bit of variation, even in the base game.

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