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[Blaeu]

About once a week my wife and I get together her her sister and her sister's husband to play a few games of Dominion.  We all try to win, but it is a casual game much more than a competitive game.  Between us we have all the expansions and we usually pick a random ten to play with.

That is the problem, a random ten with four people can lead to some VERY boring and slow games.  At least twice now I've purchased the last province to end the game knowing I was going to lose (when I could have won if dragged the game out) because I'd rather spend our remaining time on another match.

My question to you all is, do you have a good/fun way to select ten kingdom cards so that we can limit the amount of "suck" that some games have?  Once thing we tried last time was to randomize six and then each choose one.  This has lead to some fun matches because we have at least three good cards (one of the four of us usually picks something dumb >_>).

In this light, do any of you have any ideas?

[Kirian]

Deal each player four randomizer cards.  Each player picks two of those.  The last two come off the top of the randomizer deck.  Strongly recommended.

As the best player in my group, I will often veto cards that I know (but my friends don't realize) will lead to a long, unhappy game.

[Axe Knight]

My game group does one of the following:

1)Completely random, either by drawing cards or phone app.  My preferred method.
2)Hold a "draft", by dealing off the first so many cards from the deck, and choosing from those.  A lot of people like this, but I don't like it when people get to choose favorites.  I once tried this with beginners who chose every Village there was...
3)Deal out 10 cards, one at a time.  Each player gets to overrule one (or sometimes two)..  Once they overrule it, it is replaced by another one, which can be overruled by anyone else.  Once you use up your overrules, there's no more. 

[nemryn]

I often do a draft when I play: deal out 10 randomizer cards, then you go around the table and each player chooses a card, then either puts it in the supply or vetos it. Either way, you deal out a new card to replace it. With four people, you go around twice; after the last pick, you shuffle the remaining randomizers and deal out as many as you need to reach 10.

Or, for a real crazy and probably hideously unbalanced game, just take one of each card, shuffle them up and divide them into 10 piles, and just use that as your Supply. You'll probably want to put all the cards that cost a Potion in their own pile, or else just not use them at all.

[danshep]

If somebody has an iphone, I'd heartily recommend grabbing the DominionKD deck shuffler app (lacks the latest expansion though). Being able to just glance at a random kingdom set and then reshuffle if you don't think you'd like it. Getting an instant kingdom set to evaluate without having to reshuffle cards or pick and choose individual cards is a great time saver.

In a two player game, it's rare for a kingdom set to make that boring a game (and worst case, both players putting out a big money variant will get that out of the way fairly quickly), but a bad four player kingdom can just be a drag.

[Axe Knight]

Or, for a real crazy and probably hideously unbalanced game, just take one of each card, shuffle them up and divide them into 10 piles, and just use that as your Supply. You'll probably want to put all the cards that cost a Potion in their own pile, or else just not use them at all.

That's...delicious...I must try that some time.  With people who don't abhor Black Market of course...