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[yudantaiteki]

One thing I've noticed playing Dominion with a number of different new players is that people who don't have any background in CCGs take a while to get their minds around the concept of deck construction -- the idea that they're trying to shape and construct their overall deck rather than just buying single cards every round that look good.

I've wondered a few times whether you could make a learning exercise by playing a few "games" where you start out by constructing a deck (with some limitations) rather than just starting with the 3 estates and 7 coppers.  I've never actually tried this but it seems like it would have the potential to help people start to visualize their purchases as contributing to a deck rather than just "do I have one of these yet?" or "It seems like I keep running out of actions, better buy some villages".

Another idea i had was to play some learning games where the players can look through their discard pile every time they reshuffle so they can better see what their current deck looks like.

Any thoughts?

[rod-]

My first thoughts were to do something like a "challenge mode", where you set goals for the new players and they try to achieve them as quickly as possible. 

First few 'challenges':

1st to province with only X card in supply:
1) Market/chapel (teach trashing...prob best to start them out 5/2 though, unless you want to learn overtrashing too!)
2) Silver/gold : (Teach big money)
3) Village/smithy? (Teach counting total money in deck, plus light engine building practice - could be brutally slow though)

Engine/Deckbuilding:
"Draw your deck" goals with:


I'm sure there are more interesting 'tiny' boards, but if you were to play these 'games' in quick enough succession that people remembered the rough # of turns it took to complete each challenge, it might be a reasonable crash course.  You'd probably want to add something much faster, too, to show that big money isn't the only way to play.

[PSGarak]

I wouldn't worry about this overmuch. It's just an inherent property of humans when we're learning new things that have lots of details, that it takes a while to look at the trees and see the forest. When evaluating the consequences of +$1 vs +1 Card still takes significant thought and non-trivial recall, it's difficult to consider more than the immediate future. It's only when some of those thoughts become reflexive instead of conscious, that thinking beyond the current turn becomes an approachable task.

It's like learning math or a foreign language: you can't think about a whole expression if it still takes your full focus just to decode the meaning of individual characters. That higher-level thinking will come on its own, through practice and experience.

The thing that I think would help is time to reflect, so that they don't just think about in-game short-term decisions. Have them talk out loud when they're making hard decisions, and at the end of the game review your deck vs theirs and talk about the comparisons. Especially talk about how their deck "felt," e.g. too slow or not enough coin or whatever. Seeing side-by-side their potluck deck against a more tightly engineered one, they may come to the realization on their own that they need a directed strategy.