Hi all,
I received Dominion (2nd edition) as a Christmas present, and have played perhaps a dozen games so far. My girlfriend and I have really enjoyed the game - we've read about/stumbled upon some very basic card combinations (mainly just cycling with Village + Smithy, Chapel deck and Big Money) but apart from that are basically total novices.
My question concerns the recommended 'size distortion' deck: Artisan, Bandit, Bureaucrat, Chapel, Festival, Gardens, Sentry, Throne Room, Witch and Workshop. We were playing 4 player with my girlfriends parents, and we played this card combination perhaps half a dozen times. Once or twice someone managed to get a Chapel deck working (the Bandit was nice to keep topping up Gold) but as soon as we realised how good Witch was (it's a mini-Smithy, and those curses destroyed any Chapel engines, especially when multiple players had them) we stopped doing that. I tried to get a Festival, Witch and Bandit monstrosity going (mainly because no one had touched Festival, and I wanted to see what it could do), but that didn't seem to work either. At some point, discussing the board, we realised we could rush Gardens & Workshop, and then empty the Chapel deck and finish the game before we knew what was happening (after reading about this later online, emptying the Estates would have been more sensible, but we didn't think of that
). From that moment on, it felt like a 'dominant strategy' on this board. Nothing I tried could beat this quick rush, at least in 4 player, and with so many interesting cards on the board, it was quite disheartening that one algorithmic approach seemed to win so easily.
My question is, what's your read on this particular board? How would you counter a workshop + gardens rush - or would optimal play, when both of these cards are available, be for all players to go for the rush and try and execute it better than their opponent? I'd be curious how this would scale with the number of players.
Thanks
Tom
