Donald comments on first player advantage here:
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=91.0. His comments seemed to make sense at first, but since reading that, I've read several other posts in other threads that talk about how much of an advantage going first is. The place where it seems to matter the most is when cursing or Ambassador is available; because the second player will have a curse shuffled in on his first shuffle far more often than the first player will; when both players have identical openings. A few questions:
- What are the CouncilRoom statistics on this? Can it show a percentage of all games that were won by player 1?
- Are there other factors aside from early cursing/Ambassador that give player 1 an advantage?
Also, it seems to me that the first player getting an additional turn should happen about half of the time in 2-player games, which means that this is a bit more than just a "potential" advantage... it's an advantage half of the time, which isn't insignificant. Can CouncilRoom show data on how often the first player got more turns than the second player? Is there a reason why it shouldn't be about half of the time? The only reason I can think of that it might not be is that if both players play essentially equally, then player 2 should be able to buy a Province each time player 1 buys a Province; which would cause the game to end after each player has had the same number of turns.