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[Eran of Arcadia]

Way back in November 2012, some friends my wife and I knew from church invited us over to play "Dominion", which they kept describing as if we were supposed to know what it was. Well, we figured it might be worth checking out; we had several games we liked playing with people. So we headed over to their place. There were 5 people; the hosts, us, and one other guy we knew whose wife was absent. We played a couple of games using cards from the base game, Intrigue, and Hinterlands. The temporarily-single guy bought a bunch of Harems, both games, leading to lots of really bad jokes. I bought lots of Traders so I would be safe from curses. And so on.

We liked it so much we wanted to play it again some time. They said that if we got an expansion they didn't have, that would increase the variety we had. They specifically recommended Seaside and warned against Alchemy. So for Christmas 2012, my wife bought me Seaside and the Base Card Set.

Well, somehow, we never ended up playing against them again. And we have since moved halfway across the country. But for Christmas 2013, I got the 5th set (Hinterlands, after Seaside, Dark Ages, Prosperity, and Guilds) which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY. But all those other games we used to play are still boxed up from the move 9 months ago, and we have introduced it to as many people as we can.

[2.71828.....]

which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY.

Check out here or here for some ways to store all the cards.

[Wolphmaniac]

Three-player game with two friends who own base set.  I remember everyone using all extra buys to buy more coppers.  Hey why not, they're free!  I also remember one player buying a Duchy every time she hit $5.  I also remember saying at the end of the game, "I think coppers might actually be a liability" and nobody believing me. 

[KingZog3]

I also remember saying at the end of the game, "I think coppers might actually be a liability" and nobody believing me.

There was so much of this kind of thing in my group. Not just for coppers and Estate trashing, but for all kinds of cards.

[sudgy]

which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY.

I have 9 boxes, and I don't find much of a challenge with it.

[Leo1997]

It was a 3-Player Game in November 2009.

My father buys Smithys, and Smithys, and he won.
I have been hating Smithys since that game.

[theory]

The first time I ever thought about Dominion was this email from rrenaud on November 25, 2008: "Nice.  I've played Pandemic, it's pretty fun.  I also have an order of Dominion on the way, though I've never played it."  He was writing in response to this article.

My first several games were with rrenaud and my now-wife Jill at the Google offices.  He had already played the game a few times and had decided upon the Throne Room / Chancellor opening as best, because the Chancellor let you keep reshuffling until you could hit the TR/Chancellor combo for +$4.  Meanwhile, I was asking about the Moneylender card.  My exact words were, "So this is one of those late-game cards, right, where you're just pushing for VP as fast as you can and can afford to throw away your resources?"

Within a week or two, Jill and I had our own copy.  I remember vividly a 2-player game where we didn't realize that you limited the Curses and Provinces in a 2p game.  I had never yet purchased the Witch in a game, and it didn't take long for me to realize what a mistake that was.  That game lasted almost an hour, and I have never since been clobbered that badly in a game of Dominion.  Probably because the rules of 2p Dominion don't actually allow for a score of -27 to 75.

Around this time I discovered BSW, which interested me only insofar as it allowed me to play even more Dominion.  I started out playing with Jill, but soon I was playing so much Jill refused to play with me any more, especially after she discovered I was logging all my games on a spreadsheet and using it to track victory points purchased, as a sort of extremely rudimentary point tracker.  An early lesson learned in how other people do not pursue their hobbies as obsessively as I do.

It didn't slow down my BSW gaming, though.  I studied up on BGG strategy, relying on articles like Schuk's Short Analysis of the 25 Kingdom Cards and Alexfrog's Analyzing a random cardset.  They might be outdated now, but at the time, they were true pearls of wisdom for a player just starting out and who hadn't yet thought about the implications of a Chapel deck.

I played exclusively 2-player base games, given that no expansion had been released yet.  I obsessively tracked my BSW Elo rating and developed a real rivalry with yaron, a fellow 2p Dominion enthusiast who played fast and routinely clobbered me.  By March of 2009, I felt confident enough to write my first Dominion strategy article: Guide to your first two buys.

[to be continued ...]

[2.71828.....]

The Secret History of theory

[Kuildeous]

I bought a lot of Wishing Wells and kept trying to wish for cards, not understanding I had to have bought them first. 

I just love this goof-up so much.

Now I just need to invent a variant of blind zen Dominion. "Now I shall wish for Grand Market. And there it is, which is lucky because the only source of income I have is 7 Coppers…and now a Grand Market"

[theory]

[to be continued ...]

I was somewhat surprised and dismayed that my strategy article wasn’t much of a hit.  In retrospect, I would attribute this to the fact that most of the BGG community is more into “breadthgaming” than “depthgaming”.  If you look at the 100 hottest BGG posts each year, reviews are vastly more popular than strategy articles.  People go to BGG to find out about and play new games -- indeed, I would even submit that for most BGGers, boardgaming is about playing new games, as opposed to just playing games.  In such an environment, the strategy articles that do best were the ones geared towards absolute beginners (like the ones I had linked earlier), or, the 101 survey courses rather than the graduate seminars.  Not that my article was a pearl of unappreciated genius; I certainly feel very differently about it now.  But at the time, I was pretty convinced I knew how to play base Dominion optimally.

In any event, it did push me away from Dominion.  I had already reached #1 on the BSW elo rankings, and although yaron often knocked me out of the top slot, there was not really much left to explore or strive for without a community of like-minded players.  The game was essentially solved -- after 1000 base games, you’re playing on autopilot.

Shortly after I stopped playing in the spring of 2009, Intrigue came out on BSW.  Only a few cards were BSW-enabled, however, and though I tried them out, I had definitely moved on from Dominion.  Over the next year and a half, as new expansions kept coming out, rrenaud consistently made fun of me as the guy who had played base Dominion 1000 times but the expansions less than five times.  I laughed but saw no reason to get back into Dominion: I’d have to buy the expansions and play in person, a real chore compared to playing online.

Isotropic changed everything.  Dominion had the good fortune of releasing both its best expansion and its best implementation near-simultaneously.  In particular, the fact that Prosperity was available on Isotropic but not anywhere else (even in-person) was an unexpected windfall: it drove huge amounts of traffic to Isotropic, attracting players that otherwise wouldn’t be interested in playing online, while simultaneously showing off a kick-ass expansion that made people want Prosperity even more. 

But I think the real reason Isotropic became so wildly successful was that it felt right.  It didn’t feel like some bastardized simulation of a real board game.  No, it felt like Dominion the way it was meant to be played all along.  Rules were implemented cleanly and precisely.  The interface was deliberately minimalistic and got out of your way.  The only thing to focus on was the mental game.  You didn’t waste time with verifying your account, looking up commands, connecting Facebook, hosting tables, or playing bizarre provincial politics metagames.  It distilled Dominion down to its core and eliminated every other possible distraction.  Without such a seamless experience (undoubtedly the result of its alter-ego existence as the hidden Dominion playtest server), you could not imagine a text-based, “Linux-y” board game implementation modestly introduced in a BGG reply becoming a server hosting more than 10,000 games a day.

I was one of those skeptical about Dominion.  At the time, I was playing Keldon’s superb RFTG AI, which is probably how every game designer/publisher envisions their star board game implementation to look like.  “Text Dominion” was not especially exciting to me:

September 12

me: tichu? jill is doing work
Rob: okay
or text mode dominion?
it's suprisngly good..
me: hmm

September 16

me: keldon?
Rob: playing dominion on isotropic
maybe dom > race?
me: lol

But ...

September 17

me: keldon?
Rob: playing games at google
would hack out a quick dominion though
have you tried it?
me: hahaha
no i haven't
Rob: it's actually good
me: link
Rob: i promise
http://dominion.isotropic.org
me: whoa
this is like
funky
can i read the card texts?
ah
yes i cabn

And three days later …

September 20

me: you're right
completely right
isotropic dominion >>>> [RFTG Brink of War]

rrenaud’s subsequent comments proved surprisingly prophetic:

Rob: maybe dominion will have a resurgence?
me: among?
 ppl in general?
 i'm certainly thinking about reading dominion forums now

...

 my experience used to be
 that dominion strat forums were mostly junk
Rob: i mean, you could raise the quality
i've certainly learned stuff from them
me: i'm sure it's improved
 i used to read it during like
 LexH's relentless chancellor pushing days
 SOLUTION TO ALL YOUR PROBLEMS
Rob: heh

Isotropic started destroying our regular boardgame night.  rrenaud (an admitted BSG-aholic) was turning down BSG games so that he could play Isotropic instead.  We signed up for metzgerism’s BGGDL - remember that?  Yaron predictably dominated early on, but soon afterwards all these other people started coming out of the woodwork: Captain_Frisk, guided, DG, timchen, Axxle, mith, etc. etc. 

A month or so after, I sent rrenaud this email:

Subject: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"

Body:  today's entry: haven + explorer + king's court = 10 golds in deck by turn 21

In response, rrenaud writes:

I'd actually be interested in doing something like that.  Maybe take one game from isotropic per day that had something cool happen, given some commentary on the game and the strategy employed, etc.

I think you like haven a lot more than I do.

I really need to make dominionstats.com.

[to be continued ...]

[Ozle]

Woah, i always assumed FDS came before Isotropic...

[SirPeebles]

The Secret History of theory

Modestly introduced in an f.ds reply.

[Grujah]

I bought a lot of Wishing Wells and kept trying to wish for cards, not understanding I had to have bought them first. 

I just love this goof-up so much.

Now I just need to invent a variant of blind zen Dominion. "Now I shall wish for Grand Market. And there it is, which is lucky because the only source of income I have is 7 Coppers…and now a Grand Market"

.. and Grand Market wasn't even in the kingdom.

[shark_bait]

Oh man, I love reading theories posts here.  This reminds me of my introduction to isotropic.  Having gotten hooked on IRL Dominion and convinced of the depth of strategy in this game.  I went to BGG to look up strategy because my friends were not as convinced as I was about how deep the game was.  At the time I was viewing BGG it was the age of Session Reports.  Almost every session report had [isotropic] in the title and consisted of a text log of the entire game.  Not really much of a session report but eventually I said to myself, "Hmmmm, I wonder what this isotropic site is?" 

And that was the moment I opened Pandora's box.  Free time became Dominion time. 

This was before the introduction of the leaderboard so games were more low key.  I knew that I was pretty good as I won more than I lost.  However I knew that I still had lots to learn.  Soon after my introduction to isotropic I saw a player named theory online with a status "dominionstrategy.com".  I took a moment to copy and paste the link into a new tab and was instantly hooked.  I checked the site daily looking for each new post. 

I slowly got better and better.  Soon the leaderboard was introduced and I found myself sitting around level 28/29 and ranked around 200 I think.  At this point in time I approached matches against great players like yaron, yariv, WanderingWinder, Ben Wardon, DG, Obi Wan Bonogi, etc with trepidation as I felt quite over-matched.  Eventually through much practice I obtained the quintessential isotropic level 40 and topped out around 45.  It was at that point where I felt like I could legitimately win any game of Dominion against any opponent.

*Cue entrance of Stef

One afternoon on isotropic I was in the mood for some 3-player games.  I had automatch set to something like +/- 5 making levels 36-46 being present.  I was playing against someone named something like underwater (Lv 36) and another player named Stef (around Lv 38 I think).  We played a total of 3 games and in each game, Stef managed to win while I took 2nd.  I remember thinking to myself that this Stef player certainly seems a lot better than a normal level 38.  Lo and behold a few weeks later I see stef right atop the isotropic leaderboard.  I can say that I was not surprised at all.

That's all my nostalgia regarding isotropic for today.  See ya guys on Goko.

[Twistedarcher]

I wonder if I'm the only one who's been waiting for Theory to finish his secret history of F.DS....

[ipofanes]

The first time I played when the game was introduced at the local library. I instantly fell in love with the concept that you could develop a deck from a level playing field without spending $$$ on collectible cards. I remember to have overvalued Remodel.

[yed]

I wonder if I'm the only one who's been waiting for Theory to finish his secret history of F.DS....

You are not.

[LibraryAdventurer]

I was introduced to Dominion in December 2012. while hanging out with some friends who I don't see often. The one who brought Dominion only had Intrigue. He said Intrigue was similar to base but more interesting (I still agree with this, but I also know now that the base cards are easier to learn the game with), so he said it was better to get Intrigue first. We were playing with 3 or 4 players (I forget which). Of course the one who had played before won. I think I mostly bought random actions cards, but the guy who was teaching us did give us a couple strategy tips. I remember reading Steward and thinking 'Why would you ever want to use this to trash two cards?' I also remember always dicarding two cards in response to torturer because we thought getting curses would be much worse.
I rarely get a chance to hang out with that group of friends and I didn't know you could play online, so it was several months before I played it again. Then I got my own copy of Intrigue and Seaside soon after (after reading descriptions of each of the expansions and decided that would be the best one to get next). I heard that you could play online from reading those reviews of the expansions on Amazon. So I searched Dominion online on Google, and the first site that came up said something like "Sorry this site has been shut down because an official online Dominion site is now up." So I followed the link and played my first online games on Goko. After reading the forums a bit, I discovered that I just missed out on the Isotropic experience.
I also never played 2-player until I started playing online. Most games for 2-4 players are much better with 3 or 4 players so I assumed it was the same for Dominion.
After becoming familiar with this site looking at the card lists, I decided to get Dark Ages for my next expansion partly because it had more cards than any other expansion. I really like Dark Ages, but I'm wondering now whether it might've been better to get Base or Prosperity before Dark Ages because the people I most often play with (my parents) were getting better at the game a lot slower than I was (because they never play online or read the forums) and Dark Ages has a lot of cards that call for more complicated strategies to use them well.

[silverspawn]

i dont remember my very first game, but i remember a game from the same evening. i LOVED market, because it... just made a coin... and.. gave you another card and the action back. just plain +1 coin without any disadvantage. it was the only card that does that. it was PURE WIN. so I bought lots and lots of markets and trashed everything else. i didn't know that there was a difference between discarding and playing actions, so i thought that if i get my deck small enough, i could chain them forever. i was disappointed as i was told that that doesn't work, but i still won with it.

[papaHav]

My first dominion game we played 4P.
I only bought the base set, explained the rules to all and opened workshop/workshop -> one of every card -> big money, everyone followed my lead LOL.
I think not a single province was bought that game.

[zporiri]

My first experience was watching a game of Dominion that had a couple of expansions and 5 players. I remember feeling like a genius when i suggest to my friend, if you buy 8 treasuries, eventually you can guarantee buying a province

[terminalCopper]

My first dominion game we played 4P.
I only bought the base set, explained the rules to all and opened workshop/workshop [...]

At least, you understood right from the beginning, that it can be useful to spend less coins than you have. This is the beginning of deeper understanding. Many bots people never get there, even after thousands of games.