assemble_me: thank you, that helps a lot. 3 wharves would've sounded nutty to me but i sorta figured out by the end of that game that it might not be that bad!
DG: it still amazes me that players on your level take so much time to help out us randoms, but i come from communities where the top players almost all keep to themselves. definitely enjoying it here!
Game 2 - You get bad draws here but I think you still would have done better with oasis/familiar/taxman/menagerie rather than buying silvers, gold, and catacombs.
ok, this is the most interesting part of your reply to me. taxman was completely off my radar because it's always seemed slow and generally terrible to me, a la mine.
are you suggesting taxman to upgrade money without adding more cards, thereby getting more out of familiars? that was my first thought upon reading that. then i remembered that this game had vineyards - are you saying to go for those over provinces? i tend not to see how vineyards can reach that level without a true engine, but there *are* plenty of cantrips+ here so i can see how that would make sense. feels like you would need an extra potion in your deck though, no?
my reading of this as a money game was also why i didn't go harder for menageries, as you could probably tell. seems this board is more interesting than i gave it credit for!
Game 3 - Open trading post here and then look for familiars and the stonemason buys. I think the decision on whether to buy the courtyard is actually quite difficult, since if you do add a lot of familiars and a stonemason, maybe treasuries as well, then the courtyard is always going to get congested and push an action card back to your next turn.
with engine potential lacking, i didn't see a lot of good stonemason buys. $5P is the obvious one, but other than that...2x treasury is about all that seems reasonable to me, and that doesn't seem better than a gold with the way this board plays? could well be wrong!
but looking back through the log of this one, how the heck did i not see i had $5P with stonemason on turn 5? i always forget about it working with potion cards since so many other things don't, and that may well have killed me here.
Game4 - You seem to go off the plan at about turn 11. Get the third wharf, followers the next turn, and get ready for a messy endgame with an eye on some late duchy/duke scoring.
i didn't really have a plan, tbh. hence all the discussion with assemble_me on working wharf into cantrip-heavy decks.
i think what scared me with followers was that my opponent had more money than i did. i figured i was never getting a province again if i went that route, while they might still be able to spike one. but maybe going slog hurts the value of gold? i mean regardless, followers was a monster here and i was an idiot for not grabbing it when i had the chance.
Game 5 - On turn 4 here you need to buy a hunting party not an ironmonger. The game is lost for you quite soon after that though. At some stage you did need to add some treasure to your deck, or even a bureaucrat, so that you weren't just drawing and discarding coppers/curses/estates with all your drawing cards.
i just wasn't sure how many decent cards i needed in my deck for hunting party to be worth it that early. 2 is enough though, eh?
another factor here was that i always think hunting party fishes for *two* unique cards instead of just one, for some reason. maybe it's the initial cantrip bit that confuses me, or the other similar cards that grab 2 (adventurer, golem).
and i should've just resigned once things got out of hand, because i stopped caring about things like having money in my deck.
again, thank you very much!
