I had 2 beginners who never played dominion and am happy of the kingdoms I created, we had two very interesting games and they bought one copy of dominion each one (donald can thank me again
)
First game :
- cellar, moneylender, smithy, lookout, market, bazaar, cutpurse, spy, throne room, oasis
impossible to open double terminal, you can improve your deck in the beginning by trashing, drawing or attacking
First player opens moneylender silver and goes for some kind of big money
Second player opens market, copper (against my warnings), sees that the big money of first player gives big turns very fast and goes for some kind of smithy/big money
I open market/cellar. Seeing that my two beginners want to go for heavy money decks I try an engine based on throne rooms/market, and one cutpurse with lookout for trashing. My principal objective was a deck with many different actions cards to show them why you need trash, attacks, and how you can combo actions. I also avoided to buy the cards they had (so: no moneylenders, not so many smithies).
The engine was very challenging to pull out (and clearly not optimal) but I managed to get the win over the moneylender/big money. And the smithy player gets far behind stopping brutally to buy money to get one of each actions when he saw the combo possibilities.
Second game, I want to add some "rules" but let the same flavor they liked, so :
- lookout leaves for steward : choices
- bazaar leaves for tribute : one player saw this card and wanted to try it, so why not (and I hoped one player would have bought too many actions and cannot play them)
- moneylender leaves for jester (you wanted to get rid of your coppers... now get some, and discover the curses)
- cellar leaves for moat (obvious reason)
This time first player goes steward/cutpurse saying "why would you ever buy silver above steward" and goes for a heavy action deck (cruel lesson)
Second player (the one who wanted tribute) goes very fast for a heavy tribute/jester, because of opening 5$ and lucky 5$s at the beginning.
I make some heavy trashing with steward and follow on jester
Near the beginning my jester gives the too-many-action-player one more cutpure to help him drawn in terminal actions.
The tribute player's deck goes impressively great as soon as I reveal one action. He is also the only player with moat for a moment.
I finish first with a good advance (being the only one to buy golds!) but they understood their mistakes.
That was a long time I didn't have real fun playing with beginners and I'm really happy with the kingdoms I created. Everyone enjoyed the game and they learnt their mistakes by themselves seeing the other possibilities of the board.
edits: I fight against my keyboard
