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To begin, let us recall what the PPR states:

If you are trailing, do not buy the second-to-last Province if you can instead purchase lesser Victory card(s) to take the lead (taken from the blog in an article dated 2011)

While concise, the PPR is only applicable in a few circumstances and can result in sub-optimal choices when used outside of those circumstances. Consequently, let us look at the idea or the motivation behind the PPR with the intention of developing a greater understanding and a more general statement about endgames.

At its heart, the PPR is really warning you against putting the game in a position that allows your opponent to win i.e. meet a condition to end the game and have a victory point (VP) lead on their next turn(s). Note that in addition to an empty Province/Colony pile or an empty third supply pile, getting more than 50% of the VP (on finite VP kingdoms) is another effective end condition.

To determine whether your opponent can end the game, you should look at their ‘pile-emptying power’. ‘Pile-emptying power’ refers to their ability to move cards out of the supply i.e. empty piles which can be done by some combination of buying, gaining and trashing out of the supply. Accurately determining your opponent’s ‘pile-emptying power’ is not always easy but often manageable.

Another drawback of the PPR is that it encourages a defensive mindset for the endgame since you may end up mostly thinking about how to not lose the game. However, thinking about how to win the game is (at least) equally important. Thinking about how to win the game can start from turn 1 but let us concentrate on the endgame here. How to win may involve assessing your own ‘pile-emptying power’ and how to increase it so that you can win in the next turn(s) without allowing your opponent to win.

Another important aspect of how to win is knowing when you must take a risk to give yourself a winning chance. The risk here refers to giving your opponent some non-zero chance of winning on their next turn based on the decisions you make on your turn. The idea is that you should always give yourself the best chance of winning, regardless of how small, if a 100% win is not possible. Sometimes your best chance of winning is tiny and sometimes it is large; in both cases, you should make the appropriate decision(s) to achieve this. This decision is affected by numerous factors such as number of cards in play (especially Duration and Reserve cards), tracking the position of critical (maybe pile-emptying) cards and understanding how decks deteriorate while greening to name a few.

To summarise, perhaps a more general and more widely applicable statement of the PPR is to not put the game in a position that allows your opponent to win unless doing so gives you the best chance of winning.

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Dominion Articles / Re: Gold

« on: September 15, 2017, 04:52:36 pm »

Just a thought from a game that I recently finished: If you have or want to have an Encampment thing set up, then Gold's value goes up. There are obviously other things to consider with Encampment around (certainly not a straightforward card, perhaps there's an article to be written about Encampment

) but it's at least worth consideration.

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Dominion League / Re: Season 23 - Game Reports & Discussion

« on: September 07, 2017, 07:26:53 pm »

Quote from: DG on September 07, 2017, 04:16:53 pm

Quote
Game 4: https://youtu.be/1LB0G6X6fug
Party

I think you asked for some suggestions on the commentary so I'd suggest starting something like forager/forager/forager/marauder/scheme/throne room. This should make a tighter deck before adding spoils and pushing for markets. Marauder+spoils takes 2 cards out of a 5 card hand so that's fine for mid game acceleration but doesn't sustain a greening deck. The wandering minstrels should be leaving good actions on top of your deck, not ruins and marauders, so they need to be finely managed but even then I think schemes can be tidier here.

I'm always asking for suggestions/advice etc. Thank you.

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