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[Wolphmaniac]

Does anyone else feel like the percentage of games that are decided by luck before the Turn 4 shuffle or the Turn 7 shuffle is just too high?  I feel like it's a little more than 50% of all games where the players are of reasonably equal skill, and this just seems like a flaw.

[Awaclus]

I think this is an upside.

[Drab Emordnilap]

Does anyone else feel like the percentage of games that are decided by luck before the Turn 4 shuffle or the Turn 7 shuffle is just too high?  I feel like it's a little more than 50% of all games where the players are of reasonably equal skill, and this just seems like a flaw.

I don't think these numbers are accurate.

[SCSN]

It's mankind's tragic flaw that people are so keen to tell themselves that.

[pedroluchini]

If players are of equal skill, it seems sensible that they have an equal chance of winning and the outcome is random. What else would you expect?

[terminalCopper]

I think this is an upside.

Yes.

Luck increases the compatibility between players. Example given, I can play an interesting chess game against 1% of all chess players, because all the others are either way too strong or way too bad for me.

Whereas playing dominion, I can challenge the best players in the world (at least I hope so), and on the other hand, have a tough match against players who never saw forum.dominionstrategy.

[ChocophileBenj]

If players are of equal skill, it seems sensible that they have an equal chance of winning and the outcome is random. What else would you expect?

Or you can play Go, Connect Four, Chess... no chance at all.
Also, Power grid with very limitated chance. But it's longer and more complex, not what I look for when I just go back from work.

[pubby]

Or you can play Go, Connect Four, Chess... no chance at all.
Also, Power grid with very limitated chance. But it's longer and more complex, not what I look for when I just go back from work.

Connect Four has it's own tragic flaw; it's a solved game! The starting player can always win if played optimally.

[BraveBear]

Looking at dominion this way does not allow any moderate growth in skill.

When you lose a game of dominion against what you have determined an equal skill opponent you need to first look at what you did different then your opponent.  This could be anything from your opening buys not being a trasher or mid game decision to buy a gold instead of an engine piece.  I have had many games where I thought I got unlucky to then realize that my opponent just executed a better strategy.  If you have this line of thinking after each game you lose you will better yourself as a player.

Next is a big thing I think separates the great players in dominion from the mid level players.  When you obviously get unlucky in the first couple turns you need to stop and think "what am I going to do about it?!?"  Changing gears and diving into a slog or buy swingy components for the chance of a come back is hard to do when another strategy is clearly better.  However if your shuffles steer you to something else the right play may be to do that. 

Obviously there are instances where you get absolutely stupid bad luck the whole game.  You scream "Deck, I HATE YOU uuggggghhhh!"  But I think for the most part if you analyze your games and look for places where you could have done something differently or changed your strategy based on your shuffles you are going to grow as a player.  Saying that dominion is flawed because of luck is not going to help you. 

[liopoil]

Even in games of 'pure skill', between equally matched players, the game might as well be determined by luck. Unless there is a large potential for draws, in the end the game will probably be determined by something that neither player saw that happens to favor one player more.

Also I think very few games of Dominion are decided that early in the game.

[ChocophileBenj]

Or you can play Go, Connect Four, Chess... no chance at all.
Also, Power grid with very limitated chance. But it's longer and more complex, not what I look for when I just go back from work.

Connect Four has it's own tragic flaw; it's a solved game! The starting player can always win if played optimally.

I know, C4 was a bad example... among a bunch of good ones, especially go right now, far from solved and where players kinda choose when to end.
By the way, "Connect Four has it's own flag" is grammatically incorrect and isn't the abreviation of something that is grammatically correct.

[Rubby]

By the way, "Connect Four has it's own flag" is grammatically incorrect and isn't the abreviation of something that is grammatically correct.

By the way, you typed a completely wrong word while circumlocutiously criticizing a superfluous apostrophe.

[ChocophileBenj]

By the way, "Connect Four has it's own flag" is grammatically incorrect and isn't the abreviation of something that is grammatically correct.

By the way, you typed a completely wrong word while circumlocutiously criticizing a superfluous apostrophe.

Yes, maybe. But difference between "it's" and "its" is something logical you learn in your early days and you use these words everyday.

[Jeebus]

I do think there is a sometimes an annoyingly high amount of games that are decided by (very good/bad) luck. And the problem doesn't have anything to do with playing against a player of equal skill. It could be a player of almost any skill level. Although of course sometimes I've been able to win despite horrendous luck, just because the other player doesn't play well. Usually though, those games are lost.

I have had many games where I thought I got unlucky to then realize that my opponent just executed a better strategy.  If you have this line of thinking after each game you lose you will better yourself as a player.

Next is a big thing I think separates the great players in dominion from the mid level players.  When you obviously get unlucky in the first couple turns you need to stop and think "what am I going to do about it?!?"  Changing gears and diving into a slog or buy swingy components for the chance of a come back is hard to do when another strategy is clearly better.  However if your shuffles steer you to something else the right play may be to do that. 

I agree that it's better to try to deal with the situation than too... not to that, obviously.

But I disagree wholeheartedly that you should just not consider the luck factor when evaluating the strategies after a game (or even during a game). It seems to be the prevailing thinking in these forums that it's detrimental to do so. But I think that not considering the luck will make you a worse player too, and it's bad advice to give to people learning Dominion to undervalue the luck factor. The reason is that it will make you draw the wrong conclusions. If you always think that it was a decision (or several decisions) you made that made the bad thing happen, or decisions the other player made that gave him or her good draws, then you will often take away the wrong lesson. A good deck will quite often perform worse than a worse deck. This of course makes Dominion difficult to learn. You have to play something (a card combo, a Kingdom type, a card/combo against another card/combo...) many times to actually see what usually works. Or use simulators, or logic, of course, to the extent that's feasible.

[eHalcyon]

Even in games of 'pure skill', between equally matched players, the game might as well be determined by luck. Unless there is a large potential for draws, in the end the game will probably be determined by something that neither player saw that happens to favor one player more.

Also I think very few games of Dominion are decided that early in the game.

Yes, and I think it's worth clarifying why this is.  People often label games like Go and Chess as "luckless" or "pure skill".  But if the two players aren't perfect (which they never are), then there is an element of chance.  Suppose you see two or more best options that are equally viable, as far as you can tell.  How do you choose between them?  Even with perfect information, you can't examine all the way down the decision tree.  So you pick one and hope for the best.  Maybe you get lucky with the right choice, maybe you don't.

[BraveBear]

I do think there is a sometimes an annoyingly high amount of games that are decided by (very good/bad) luck. And the problem doesn't have anything to do with playing against a player of equal skill. It could be a player of almost any skill level. Although of course sometimes I've been able to win despite horrendous luck, just because the other player doesn't play well. Usually though, those games are lost.

I have had many games where I thought I got unlucky to then realize that my opponent just executed a better strategy.  If you have this line of thinking after each game you lose you will better yourself as a player.

Next is a big thing I think separates the great players in dominion from the mid level players.  When you obviously get unlucky in the first couple turns you need to stop and think "what am I going to do about it?!?"  Changing gears and diving into a slog or buy swingy components for the chance of a come back is hard to do when another strategy is clearly better.  However if your shuffles steer you to something else the right play may be to do that. 

I agree that it's better to try to deal with the situation than too... not to that, obviously.

But I disagree wholeheartedly that you should just not consider the luck factor when evaluating the strategies after a game (or even during a game). It seems to be the prevailing thinking in these forums that it's detrimental to do so. But I think that not considering the luck will make you a worse player too, and it's bad advice to give to people learning Dominion to undervalue the luck factor. The reason is that it will make you draw the wrong conclusions. If you always think that it was a decision (or several decisions) you made that made the bad thing happen, or decisions the other player made that gave him or her good draws, then you will often take away the wrong lesson. A good deck will quite often perform worse than a worse deck. This of course makes Dominion difficult to learn. You have to play something (a card combo, a Kingdom type, a card/combo against another card/combo...) many times to actually see what usually works. Or use simulators, or logic, of course, to the extent that's feasible.

The point I was trying to get across was to FIRST look at how your strategy was different then your opponents before you go ahead a chalk up the loss to luck.  If you can back track your deck build and reasonably say that your opponent played a less then ideal strategy while you had some unfortunate draws, then and only then can you use luck as an excuse.  I didn't say that you should never consider luck in your game analysis.  I just think many players get frustrated with their deck underperforming because of what they think is bad luck, when a lot of the time its their build order or basic strategy that is the problem.

[Throwaway_bicycling]

Does anyone else feel like the percentage of games that are decided by luck before the Turn 4 shuffle or the Turn 7 shuffle is just too high?  I feel like it's a little more than 50% of all games where the players are of reasonably equal skill, and this just seems like a flaw.

So far as I can tell, the single largest luck factor in a single game is just: who goes first? Last word on this that I remember suggested a P1 win rate of about .57 averaged over all games. Even if not quite that high now, it's high enough to be remarkable, and I believe all serious matches require equal number of first player starts.

What I find most interesting about Dominion is that, despite the obvious role that chance plays in shuffle luck *and* the relatively small absolute number of "controversial" or "non-book" decisions per game, good players end up with so much better results than poor players. As best as I can tell, a good part of this is because you end up "owning" some of your mistakes for the rest of the game. So, if I buy a card that really doesn't work well with my deck, once per shuffle I will either be playing a card that I wish were something different, or not playing that card and eating the opportunity cost.

I have a hunch that one "metric" that may well do a pretty good job of separating better from weaker players is the number of turns that a card *could* have been bought, but nothing was bought. Or the number of times a more expensive card could have been bought, but a cheaper card was bought instead. Not that this is an automatic strategy, but somebody who does this probably is really thinking about their deck, and if their thinking is any good at all, they are likely to be a pretty decent player.

[ghostofmars]

So far as I can tell, the single largest luck factor in a single game is just: who goes first? Last word on this that I remember suggested a P1 win rate of about .57 averaged over all games. Even if not quite that high now, it's high enough to be remarkable, and I believe all serious matches require equal number of first player starts.

I doubt that being the first player is the dominating luck factor in the game. There are several other random events that occur that have a significant impact. Naturally, the first few turns are most important, because they affect all subsequent turns. In particular, a 5/2 or a 4/3 opening, the opening buys colliding, or if one or both opening buys miss turn 3/4 has an impact comparable to the starting player advantage.

To back this with some data, here are the simulation results for a board where Smithy BM is the best strategy.*
First player - second player (random starting hands): 52% - 40%
4/3 - 5/2 (random player order): 64% - 29%
So on this board, the first player advantage can be completely offset by the starting hand.

*) I did not optimize the strategies so both numbers would change slightly.

[Seprix]

Dominion's only tragic flaw is Goko.

[Chris is me]

Does anyone else feel like the percentage of games that are decided by luck before the Turn 4 shuffle or the Turn 7 shuffle is just too high?  I feel like it's a little more than 50% of all games where the players are of reasonably equal skill, and this just seems like a flaw.

Advantages are given, but the game is really rarely decided at that point. Defeated players are more likely to play into confirmation bias and go "oh, I knew it was over as soon as (unfavorable luck) happened" when they lose, and ignoring that when they win.

Dominion like many other good probability managment competitive games is not something where a single game's outcome should be a judge of how good of a game is. That's like judging the merits of poker based on a single hand. It's the long game that matters - that's why the Salvager leaderboard is what it is and why even tournaments are 6 game matches.

[theblankman]

Does anyone else feel like the percentage of games that are decided by luck before the Turn 4 shuffle or the Turn 7 shuffle is just too high?

Yes, but luck isn't the reason, at least not as often as you think.  Dominion's core mechanic is a rich-get-richer mechanic: you spend most of the game (before greening) trying to improve your deck, but the better your deck is, the more it can improve itself.  The same amount of either skill disaparity (one player makes a better choice) or luck disparity (something improbable happens to favor one player) will therefore tend to have a larger effect on the outcome if it happens earlier in the game. 

Or you can play Go, Connect Four, Chess... no chance at all.

Or you can play Go with plenty of chance, since it has a built-in handicap system that's been tested over hundreds of years.  I frequently play close, tense Go games with players far stronger or weaker than myself. 

[cactus]

Luck becomes more of a factor when the skill of the players are evenly matched. So you could try playing the game against people who are much better than you or much worse than you. Then skill would've a more significant factor. 

Seriously though I think Dominion's fatal flaw is that the first few turns aren't -somehow- blinded. The really annoying thing is when you analyse a board and come up with a brilliant and unusual strategy - but you first move telegraphs to the other player where you are going - they work out what you were going to do and mimic it exactly - and then they win. That is a scenario that plays out too often in Dominion and really makes me grind my teeth.

How was that for a humblebrag?