I’ve been playing some Dominion lately, and for some reason I’m pretty bad at the game. Here’s some things I’ve noticed:
1) Even if you buy several moats, you won’t have any in your hand when everyone else is playing thieves and witches. As soon as you do get one in your hand (or two or three!), nobody will play any attack cards.
2) Any time you play a card that lets you draw more cards, but doesn’t give you more actions (i.e. Council Room, Witch, Moat) the only cards you draw will be action cards. Conversely, any time you play an adventurer, the first two cards you draw will be treasure (and most likely copper) so you won’t get to cycle through your useless green cards.
3) As soon as a pile runs out, it is automatically the one that you were going to buy the next turn, and you just happened to have exactly enough money to spend on it. Also that amount of money will most likely buy nothing else useful.
4) If the Witch is in the game, the curses pile will always run out first.
I mentioned that I seem to be pretty bad at this game… but I’ve just come up with a new strategy that will surely help. I’m changing from the “ooh shiny!” strategy where I would buy all sorts of “shiny” action cards because they look cool and do all sorts of fun stuff, and ignore the old boring treasure and victory cards because… well, I’ve already got some of them. My new strategy is to NOT buy the shiny action cards, and instead focus on money early on and victory points later. Sure its going to be hard to resist buying a moat when everyone else has witches, thieves, spies and bureaucrats, but chances are the moat isn’t going to help you anyway, since it never seems to be in your hand when you need it, and the cards you draw from playing it don’t help either.
Like I said, I’m not very good at this game, but I am going to try that new strategy, and let you know how it goes.
