Melbourne Cup Dominion

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup day, which meant everyone had the day off (if you live in Victoria anyway). F came over for lunch, so afterwards we introduced her to Dominion.

F is definitely no gamer. She was initially a little weirded out by not having a board ("I like to see my piece move all around the table!"). But pretty soon she got over that and picked up the game really quickly.

We played the first game with the standard starting deck. Both K and I agreed that for some reason it seemed like it took a long time for things to get up and running - money seemed to be a really tight for a lot longer than normal. But this might have just been because the game was slower while F got her head around it all. I scored a fairly convincing victory - getting 6 Provinces in a 3 player game is always a pretty good sign.

We then played two random decks. In the first game, the cards I was most interested in were the Bureaucrat (I love that card) and the Chapel. I've always struggled to work out the point of the Chapel (aside from getting ride of any Curse cards). But recently I read about a deck minimization tactic. The basic idea is to try and keep your deck as small as possible so your best cards come around more often.

So I decided I would give that a try.

I didn't get off to a very good start - it wasn't until about half way through the game that I started getting rid of cards, and my Chapels had a tendency to clump together in the same hand. I managed to win by 1 point, but that was really much more because of the Bureaucrat than the Chapel.

In the next game we played, the Chapel came out again. So I decided to give my tactic another try. This time I was a lot more aggressive with trashing cards. I also picked up a Money Lender, so when I could I was trashing Coppers for Silvers, or just trashing them outright. I was also pretty ruthless about getting rid of action cards as soon as they outlived their usefulness. So by the end, I was regularly getting hands of 3 or 4 Golds.

Ideally I would have liked to get some extra buys or something like a remodel (turn Gold into a Provence) into my hand, but it ended up being a pretty quick game. I had 5 Provinces, which was enough to beat F by about 5 points.

By the end of the second game, I was pretty happy with the Chapel tactic. It's quite different to how I normally play, and it's certainly not for anyone who doesn't like shuffling. But I liked it a lot.