I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the Articles board. I'll choose here.
I wanted to share a couple of things that I've been working on recently that I think have improved my gameplay. They have been mentioned here before in one form or another but I've gained a deeper understanding of why these things are important and I wanted to share my insights. They involve situations where you don't want to play your action cards.
When I learned the game at first, it seemed that actually playing out your turn in Dominion was sort of done on auto-pilot. Play all your villages and non-terminals first, then play your terminals that draw, then the rest of your terminals. You can make small optimizations to this while still remaining on auto-pilot by alternating Village+Terminal Draw so that you leave yourself with one action remaining a lot. This isn't perfect, but it will get you off the ground in Dominion and give you a sense of what it feels like to play lots of actions in a turn and stuff like that, and hey, it's the best thing you can do about 80% of the time.
But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you can do better, a LOT better, and sometimes doing a lot better involves not playing an action card even though you have the action(s) to do it.
1. Dead draw: If your economy comes from actions cards and/or you have an action-dense deck, you may think you want to dead draw. Yeah it doesn't hurt this turn and maybe I'll draw something that helps. But I can promise you that you aren't helping your next turn, and I can think of very few situations where that small chance of helping this turn is worth a big chance of hurting your next turn. Every time I dead draw, no matter what, a little alarm goes off in my head and I ask myself if I really want to do this. What is left in my deck that I'm likely to draw? Am I going to want to start my next turn with that in hand? Is my buy this turn really going to be helped that much if I get what I want? This is such an incredibly helpful improvement to the way I look at the game.
2. Reshuffles: the extreme cases are obvious: 20 action cards in play and 10+ cards in my discard? Just stop drawing cards. Smithy and four green cards in hand and less than three cards in my draw pile? Trigger that shuffle! Yeah the cases in between are a little more difficult to judge in general but guess what? You don't have to judge them in general! Every time you're about to do something that will make you shuffle your cards, just think about what's going to happen if you do that. How many cards are you shuffling? What's the general quality of what's in your discard compared to what's in your hand+play area? What are you hoping to draw and how big of a deal is it that you have it RIGHT NOW, potentially at the cost of your next turn or two? This is a lot easier for me to do IRL because shuffling invokes a delay in the game. I used to mind when my opponents would cause a mid-turn reshuffle because it delayed the game, but now I realize that more often than not they are doing themselves a disservice, so I just sit back and smile. Nothing is worse than knowing that your next turn or two is just going to be terrible and you can't do anything about it. It didn't take me long to feel this pain and want to prevent it whenever possible (once I learned that it is possible most of the time).
Dominion can be a game of auto-play, but knowing the times where it's important to stop and think is the first and most important step to stopping and thinking at the right times, so that you can make the best move.