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[philosophyguy]

When I teach Dominion to new folks, the stage of play that confuses them the most is that they draw at the end of their clean-up phase. For some reason, it doesn't feel intuitive to draw cards then.

In order to get around this hang-up, I've started teaching the game as four phases: Act, Buy, Clean-Up, and Draw. This order still keeps the A-B-C progression of the "official" rules and helps reinforce that they do in fact draw at the end of their turn.

My question is: are there edge cases in which this division of the clean-up phase into clean-up and draw will create problems down the line? I can't think of any offhand, but I wanted to check with others to see if I was overlooking something.

[guided]

Outlook is the only problematic in-print case that I can think of off the top of my head (though you could fix it by replacing "clean-up phase" with "draw phase" in the card text). There may be others I haven't thought of, and of course there could be future cards where it matters. Sometimes weird-seeming Dominion rules end up getting fully justified by new cards, since so many of the cards in all the expansions were already planned out before the base game was printed.

[rinkworks]

Seems fine to me to think of the turn in whatever number of phases you want, so long as you mentally convert whenever the card text refers to a particular phase.  It's occurred to me that not only are there is there this hidden "draw" phase but two others as well.  Broken down more completely, I'd say your turn consists of actually six distinct activities:

Action Phase:

(1) Process duration cards and Horse Traders cards still in play from previous turns.
(2) Play and resolve action cards from your hand.

Buy Phase:

(3) Play and resolve treasure cards from your hand.
(4) Buy cards from the supply piles.

Cleanup Phase:

(5) Discard cards in play, performing clean-up actions as needed.
(6) Draw your next hand.

Making the mental delineation between steps (3) and (4), rather than lumping them together into "the Buy phase" helps understand one of the rules of Dominion better, which is that you have to play all treasures you're ever going to play that turn before you buy that first card.  So you can't lay down two Golds, buy a Grand Market, then plunk down some Coppers for a second buy.  Admittedly it's not often where that distinction actually matters, and Grand Market is probably not one of the cards you use to teach newcomers to the game.  But strictly speaking, steps (3) and (4) are very different activities performed at distinct, non-overlapping stages of your turn.  So I think it's perfectly fair to make a separation between them, just as you've pointed out for steps (5) and (6).

[DsnowMan]

When I teach Dominion to new folks, the stage of play that confuses them the most is that they draw at the end of their clean-up phase. For some reason, it doesn't feel intuitive to draw cards then.

I thought people liked drawing cards    Just ask them if they want something to look at when it's not their turn. They will start drawing cards.

I have more trouble the first few times with "discard everything". Yes, the money. Yes, the card you just bought. Yes, those cards in your hand as well. EVERYTHING. That part seems unnatural the first few times.

[Kuildeous]

I thought people liked drawing cards

I didn't read that to mean that the new players hate drawing cards. In a lot of games, the players draw cards at the beginning of a turn. Of course, there are a lot where players draw afterwards, but those seem to be less frequent and less intuitive. As an example, we had that issue with the Lost Cities board game. You play first and then draw a card. Players kept wanting to draw a card first. And even if play our card first, we forgot many times to draw a card.

Of course, you can use Militia as an illustration of why you draw at the end of your turn. Also, it helps with planning ahead.