Just played two games in a row in which I was dead in the water, realised that my only hope was to try something a little bit different, and to my surprise pulled it off. Unsurprisingly, both had King's Courts.
In the
first game I opened Council Room/nothing, hoping to pull in an early King's Court before trashing away all my starting cards. That clearly didn't work, and my opponent was King's Courting well before me. By turn 13, he had a 2-Province lead, and I was still putting my engine together. Turn 14 I had $15, plenty of buys, and a choice. I could follow him into the Provinces and likely be following him for the rest of the game, or I could buy more King's Courts and stuff and hope for a big mega-turn. Instead, I decided to trash all my treasure, Remaking my 3 Silvers into Barons, and my Gold into a King's Court. With my remaining $6, I bought back some Estates. My opponent responded by buying 2 more Provinces and a Smithy. Fortunately, I then managed to King's Court all three of my Barons, discarding 6 Estates and gaining 3, giving me enough money to buy out the rest of the Provinces and win by 4 Estates.
In the
second game, my opponent bought the first Province of the game in turn 10 and already had a handy lead from his Monuments. Seeing as the only source of +Buy on the board was Contraband, there was no way I was going to catch up in the Province race. So I decided to forgo buying Provinces altogether, and bought a Contraband. I then put together a King's Court/Envoy/Oracle/Monument engine (Oracle was necessary after I realised Envoy can't draw your whole deck) that was netting me 10-20 VP/turn, and as I had hoped, his deck slowed down enough that he couldn't finish the game before I caught up to him. Fortunately for me, he kept prohibiting me from buying Victory Cards, allowing me to buy two engine pieces per turn until I had 7 Monuments and was King's Courting all of them nearly every turn. I finally bought the last Province when I was confident I had the lead.
In both games I was frustrated early and thought I had lost, but they just reminded me that quite often there's a different way of going about things that can bring the odds back in your favour.
