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[flies]

I hit level 40 today! Yay for me!

I was bragging about this to my friend who has played Dominion just a few times (let me tell you, he was SO impressed...), and he asked me how much of being good at Dominion is memorization.  He was comparing it to chess, where, he said (I have no idea), you can improve a lot by learning how certain openings score against others, essentially.  (If you're familiar with chess, great, but let's not compare chess and dominion cuz that's silly.)

Clearly, knowledge helps a whole lot in Dominion: for instance, Jack is a much better opener than it appears to the uninitiated, wharf is really strong and versatile, cursers are (usually) a very high priority early etc.  My sense is that most of this can be picked up just by playing, though familiarity with DS and F.DS, councilroom (RIP), etc speeds up the process.

So I would say that memorization alone could get you to level 20 or so, but because, unlike chess, the setup of dominion is different every time, you need the skill of seeing how the cards interact.  Of course, some combos come up a lot, and learning about those might get you to 30 (maybe), but the kingdom will perturb that knowledge.  I don't think there's any way to obtain that skill besides playing.

So, how much of being good at Dominion is memorizing stuff, do you think?

[Eevee]

i think just memorizing big money strategies and how they fare against different things (and executing them well ofc) would get you up to level 25-30.

[Axxle]

I play with very little high level memorization, just really know some speeds of the basic big money, and I've gotten to 37 at my peak, so it's not necessary.

[HiveMindEmulator]

It depends on what you mean by memorization. Is your friend saying that chess is mostly memorization? I think you can improve in both Dominion and chess through a lot of pattern recognition, which I guess you could call "memorization". Rather than thinking through a lot of logic every time, you just recognize situations that are similar to some you've learned about before and apply similar principles. For example, if you know that it's better to buy Witch over Gold first in Witch+money, you don't need to memorize a separate rule about buying Mountebank over Gold. And then in games with other cards in addition to the curser, you can still also apply this same principle about favoring getting the curser early over Gold.

[WanderingWinder]

I hit level 40 today! Yay for me!

I was bragging about this to my friend who has played Dominion just a few times (let me tell you, he was SO impressed...), and he asked me how much of being good at Dominion is memorization.  He was comparing it to chess, where, he said (I have no idea), you can improve a lot by learning how certain openings score against others, essentially.  (If you're familiar with chess, great, but let's not compare chess and dominion cuz that's silly.)

Clearly, knowledge helps a whole lot in Dominion: for instance, Jack is a much better opener than it appears to the uninitiated, wharf is really strong and versatile, cursers are (usually) a very high priority early etc.  My sense is that most of this can be picked up just by playing, though familiarity with DS and F.DS, councilroom (RIP), etc speeds up the process.

So I would say that memorization alone could get you to level 20 or so, but because, unlike chess, the setup of dominion is different every time, you need the skill of seeing how the cards interact.  Of course, some combos come up a lot, and learning about those might get you to 30 (maybe), but the kingdom will perturb that knowledge.  I don't think there's any way to obtain that skill besides playing.

So, how much of being good at Dominion is memorizing stuff, do you think?

Your friend doesn't know chess very well. Or is a super-grandmaster.

I think very little of Dominion is memorization,a t least as it is played now. Knowing certain combos will help a bit, and well, I guess memorizing the cards helps a lot, but other than that, there's not so much. You can work out the gist of most stuff on your own.

[blueblimp]

Well I'm only level 40 now, and I really can't think of anything I'd memorize to improve. All I know is some facts about each card and some strong 2-card combos, and that's enough to do pretty well.

Some of the leaderboard-topping players are engine-heavy, and how can they possibly be memorizing engines that only show up in 1 kingdom ever?

[popsofctown]

Depends how broadly you mean memorization.  Technically anything besides the talent from my genome (or in my case, lack thereof) can be considered memorization.

[jonts26]

Well I'm only level 40 now, and I really can't think of anything I'd memorize to improve. All I know is some facts about each card and some strong 2-card combos, and that's enough to do pretty well.

Some of the leaderboard-topping players are engine-heavy, and how can they possibly be memorizing engines that only show up in 1 kingdom ever?

You're thinking way too specifically. It's about memorizing past engine groups, not the exact engine components. Many many engines have more or less interchangable parts with maybe one or two more unique components. So if you recall a game where XYZ engine worked really well, you can probably count on X'YZ working really well too.

[blueblimp]

Well I'm only level 40 now, and I really can't think of anything I'd memorize to improve. All I know is some facts about each card and some strong 2-card combos, and that's enough to do pretty well.

Some of the leaderboard-topping players are engine-heavy, and how can they possibly be memorizing engines that only show up in 1 kingdom ever?

You're thinking way too specifically. It's about memorizing past engine groups, not the exact engine components. Many many engines have more or less interchangable parts with maybe one or two more unique components. So if you recall a game where XYZ engine worked really well, you can probably count on X'YZ working really well too.

Well, the comparison was to chess openings, where (although I may just be ignorant because of not playing much chess) exact memorization can help quite a bit.

[liopoil]

Your friend doesn't know chess very well. Or is a super-grandmaster.

That's right. Memorizing openings in chess will no get you very far at all. They only become helpful in chess once you are already very good at it. When learning chess the best way to get better is to study tactics. If you play a chess opening perfectly and your opponent doesn't, all you will have gained is a slight positional advantage. This won't help you at all if you miss a tactic and are suddenly down a piece.

I think you actually can compare dominion to chess in a way though. While each dominion game has a different kingdom, each game of chess will usually reach a unique position. Analyzing a chess position is as important as analyzing the kingdom.  In some sense memorizing the various engines and BM strategies in dominion does help you. However, experience seems to me the only way to get a good sense of how many of what cards you need in your strategy.

Another analogy: In the endgame of a game of dominion you sometimes have to calculate quite a bit to decide whether to buy that penultimate province, or if it's worth buying that duchy right now. this is especially true IRL without point counters. In the endgame in chess it is often worth it to spend quite a bit of time calculating it out, often as long as 15 minutes. This is from 8+ years and hundreds of tournament games of chess experience.