Recently there was a post about Bridge (the game, not the card) which got me looking into the game briefly. Apparently it's common to run what is called Duplicate Bridge at tournaments. For those unfamiliar with the game, one hand of Bridge consists of each team member taking certain roles (based on their position relative to the dealer), and the four players each get thirteen cards (so the whole 52-card no-joker deck is dealt). In Duplicate Bridge, several rounds are played where several sets of opponents play the exact same thirteen cards, and the scoring systems are (in theory) designed to balance the effects of "poor" hands vs "strong" hands and measure each teams skill with those cards. Apologies to the Bridge players if I've butchered anything, but what I e described above is a sufficient intro to what I propose here.
I don't have a system fully fleshed out here; indeed, the reason for this post is to gather more ideas on feasibility and implementation.
The outcome of any given game of Dominion (wait for it) depends on the board (!) and the starting hands. Some "solutions" have been proposed to the starting hands "problem" -- identical starting hands, force 4/3, agree on 4/3 or 5/2 and force what is agreed on, and many others. What I would like to do for a physical-cardboard tournament is to keep the individual games as the rulebook describes, and find a match scoring system that balances the effect of the starting hands and boards by somehow comparing the results of other games played under identical conditions in the same tournament.
The match structure would involve arranging the boards and drawing all the starting hands for all the round 1 games before any players are seated, and recording the starting hands (leave the boards on the table between games). Then for round 2, reset the starting hands to the same as they were in round 1, and shuffle the players around in some predetermined (semi?)random fashion. Repeat until a sufficient number of rounds are played; for very small tournaments, this may be when all players have played all others.
I'm thinking the scoring system would either (1) reward more for wins from "hard" situations (ones with a low final win percentage), or (2) penalize losses from "easy" situations (ones with high win percentage), or both. This incentivizes players to optimize their performance in each individual game, which is what I want -- no sort of VP comparison would be acceptable. Exactly how to form those metrics (what the factors are for rewarding/penalizing), or alternative "balancing" metrics, or even whether acceptable metrics exist, is the question posed by this post.