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[philosophyguy]

I have a friend who is comfortable with BM but is fairly intimidated by any sort of engine. What I'd like to do is assemble some sets that we can walk through together so she can get a better sense of how engines work and start to build her comfort level.

Can I recruit the hive DS mind to help generate a list of kingdoms that are conducive to simple engines?

Some ideas I had to start: the Village/Envoy engine assembled in the the semifinal round of the DS Championship (key cards = Village, Envoy, Remake); a Governor/Chapel engine; a Scrying Pool/Worker's Village/Conspirator engine.

Other suggestions for card combinations/Kingdom sets that demonstrate straightforward engine building techniques?

[Fabian]

Some Market/Peddler/trash-for-benefit stuff

Some Tactician/Black Market stuff

Some Goons stuff (bonus if it includes Watchtower)

A few suggestions anyway

[ackack]

The "deck archetypes" post would probably have some good ideas.

I think you're off to the right start in picking some powerful enginey cards and then seeing how to make them particularly important. KC, Pool, Wharf, Hunting Party all strike me as good choices in this regard. While there are exceptions, I feel a good heuristic for whether an engine will be worthwhile is whether big turns are possible or not. That's the main thing I'd be trying to teach somebody, along with assessments for how realistic and quick those big turns are.

[Geronimoo]

I'd start with the simplest of engines: Hunting Party. This engine consists of as many Hunting Parties as possible and 1 Gold and a few Silvers. It doesn't want to buy extra Golds over Hunting Parties (so it's not Big Money which would prefer as many Golds as possible).

The next step is an engine with 2 parts like Fishing Village/Wharf. It has the +Action, +Buy and +Cards needed to build an engine and it will only want a few Golds (2 most of the time). This engine performs best building towards double Province.

Then you can start adding engines with trashers (to enable Conspirator engines that require thin decks...)

And then there are the Remake/Upgrade decks that are constantly rebuilding themselves (to me the ones I understand the least)

And many many more...

[DG]

Chapel, festival, library (basic)
Upgrade, wishing well, conspirator (intrigue)
Fishing village, wharf, maybe with salvager (seaside)

[tlloyd]

Once your friend has tried building some basic engines, I'd break out a University/Watchtower game with decent trashing and some power $5's. Those are just too much fun.

[jonts26]

I think maybe it's important to not necessarily think about the exact cards so much as the function those cards serve and then build boards which highlight how that function works in an engine.

Specifically, you could have a board with a workable engine (eg village/wharf/conspirator) with no trashing, then try the same board with a chapel or remake to highlight how strong trashing benefits the engine. Or you could try an engine with no +buy and then add a good +buy card (or even a +buy vs. virtual buy like HoP, Border Village, Ironworks etc).

[ftl]

I actually had basically this exact situation. I played a lot online, and got ahead in Dominion; had to help my regular IRL game partner catch up with me.

Which sets do you have? At the time, I had Base, Intrigue, and Seaside. I went with the following sets:

Minion Demo:
Cellar, Feast, Festival, Throne Room, Pawn, Minion, Upgrade, Lookout, Warehouse, Caravan

Library Demo:
Cellar, Festival, Library, Remodel, Ironworks, Pawn, Fishing Village, Haven, Lighthouse, Warehouse

Laboratory Demo:
Cellar, Feast, Laboratory, Spy, Witch, Pawn, Ambassador, Haven, Caravan, Warehouse

More complicated multi-part engine:
Chapel, Cellar, Militia, Thief, Council Room, Throne Room, Market, Festival, Workshop, Fishing Village

...actually, I may as well just share the googledoc I made at the time. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TRVImznfSm9ZqIaXK0zq0T6LkhxMmcnjnxCmGa2HysI/edit?hl=en_US . Obviously, if you have different sets or are playing on Isotropic with everything, you'll want to use different ones, but the stuff I had there (including the explanations) worked pretty well for me for getting my partner up to speed.

[philosophyguy]

That lesson plan is awesome.

We have all the sets, promos, everything at this point (what can I say, I'm addicted), so I'm open to suggestions that make use of anything.

[werothegreat]

I'd start with the simplest of engines: Hunting Party. This engine consists of as many Hunting Parties as possible and 1 Gold and a few Silvers. It doesn't want to buy extra Golds over Hunting Parties (so it's not Big Money which would prefer as many Golds as possible).

The next step is an engine with 2 parts like Fishing Village/Wharf. It has the +Action, +Buy and +Cards needed to build an engine and it will only want a few Golds (2 most of the time). This engine performs best building towards double Province.

Then you can start adding engines with trashers (to enable Conspirator engines that require thin decks...)

And then there are the Remake/Upgrade decks that are constantly rebuilding themselves (to me the ones I understand the least)

And many many more...

I would start even simpler with Lab...  And Village/Smithy is simpler than Fishing Village/Wharf.

[WanderingWinder]

I'd start with the simplest of engines: Hunting Party. This engine consists of as many Hunting Parties as possible and 1 Gold and a few Silvers. It doesn't want to buy extra Golds over Hunting Parties (so it's not Big Money which would prefer as many Golds as possible).

The next step is an engine with 2 parts like Fishing Village/Wharf. It has the +Action, +Buy and +Cards needed to build an engine and it will only want a few Golds (2 most of the time). This engine performs best building towards double Province.

Then you can start adding engines with trashers (to enable Conspirator engines that require thin decks...)

And then there are the Remake/Upgrade decks that are constantly rebuilding themselves (to me the ones I understand the least)

And many many more...

I would start even simpler with Lab...  And Village/Smithy is simpler than Fishing Village/Wharf.

But village/smithy is terrible without another component (sorta hard to find that component, too). FV/Wharf is NOT terrible without that other component.

[ftl]

 

I would start even simpler with Lab...  And Village/Smithy is simpler than Fishing Village/Wharf.

I disagree, wereothegreat. Two reasons:

1) Village/Smithy isn't actually a playable engine. It's not better than Smithy+Money. Part of teaching engines is teaching when they make sense to do. You want to get a feel for how fast you need engine components and so on, and if you're doing an engine that isn't worth the time, that's sort of pointless. 
2) Lab is actually trickier to demo as an engine than you think, because it's good without an engine. If you go lab+money (taking golds over labs always), that does better than going for a lab engine (mostly taking labs over golds). You need more in the set to make a lab engine worthwhile.

Whereas, the whole point of the exercise is to get a player comfortable with building an engine - deliberately taking steps AWAY from Big Money, skipping treasures to buy engine components.

[philosophyguy]

Excellent suggestions so far!

One comment I'll make is that, at least in this specific case, my playgroup gets the idea of stackable cards like Lab. What they struggle with is putting together a couple of different cards that synergize in some way. So, while Hunting Party or Lab (or even Minion decks, to some extent) are within their grasp, something like Fishing Village/Wharf (rather than just Wharf-BM) is going to be new for them. ftl's demos of non-replacing cards + Library or Council Room + Militia are exactly the kind of thing my group needs, because they would struggle to figure out how to make those actions work together without some guidance.

On preview: what ftl said.

[werothegreat]

I would start even simpler with Lab...  And Village/Smithy is simpler than Fishing Village/Wharf.

I disagree, wereothegreat. Two reasons:

1) Village/Smithy isn't actually a playable engine. It's not better than Smithy+Money. Part of teaching engines is teaching when they make sense to do. You want to get a feel for how fast you need engine components and so on, and if you're doing an engine that isn't worth the time, that's sort of pointless. 
2) Lab is actually trickier to demo as an engine than you think, because it's good without an engine. If you go lab+money (taking golds over labs always), that does better than going for a lab engine (mostly taking labs over golds). You need more in the set to make a lab engine worthwhile.

Whereas, the whole point of the exercise is to get a player comfortable with building an engine - deliberately taking steps AWAY from Big Money, skipping treasures to buy engine components.

I was under the impression that the Lab IS the engine.  The engine is what draws all your necessary cards.  Fun terminals that don't draw cards I wouldn't consider part of an engine.  So when I say to start off with Smithy/Village as an engine, obviously there is other stuff that will be needed - but that's not part of the engine.  While Moneylenders or Mines or Goons or what have you are necessary to buy the relevant things at the end of your turn, they're not part of your engine.  In fact, if you draw them without your engine, you're almost screwed, because then you're stuck with the few fun terminals you may have drawn.  These may be pretty powerful on their own, but you need the engine to get the full effect.  Scheme and Alchemist help to ameliorate this.  What's nice is when your engine hosts your fun terminals, such as Fishing Village/Wharf, or Margrave/any Village, but I would start with Village/Smithy because it's simply about the engine, and doesn't muck around with Durations.  You won't always have Fishing Village and Wharf in play, but there will usually be some sort of Village and some sort of drawing card.  Village/Smithy helps give the idea of "hey, should go for that."

[ftl]

I was under the impression that the Lab IS the engine.  The engine is what draws all your necessary cards.  Fun terminals that don't draw cards I wouldn't consider part of an engine.   So when I say to start off with Smithy/Village as an engine, obviously there is other stuff that will be needed - but that's not part of the engine.  While Moneylenders or Mines or Goons or what have you are necessary to buy the relevant things at the end of your turn, they're not part of your engine.  In fact, if you draw them without your engine, you're almost screwed, because then you're stuck with the few fun terminals you may have drawn.  These may be pretty powerful on their own, but you need the engine to get the full effect.  Scheme and Alchemist help to ameliorate this.  What's nice is when your engine hosts your fun terminals, such as Fishing Village/Wharf, or Margrave/any Village, but I would start with Village/Smithy because it's simply about the engine, and doesn't muck around with Durations.  You won't always have Fishing Village and Wharf in play, but there will usually be some sort of Village and some sort of drawing card.  Village/Smithy helps give the idea of "hey, should go for that."

The complexity of the whole board is what matters, not just the complexity of the 'engine' part.

Village/Smithy might be the simplest engine, but any board where Village/Smithy is worthwhile is necessarily going to have a lot of additional stuff that you have to think about, because Village/Smithy is pretty bad on its own. You have those additional fun terminals that you vaguely alluded to. And it probably takes a good bit of finesse to make Village/Smithy work out, even if those fun terminals are quite good. So I think calling Village/Smithy simpler than Fishing Village/Wharf is VERY misleading.

Sure, the cards making up the engine part might be simpler, because you don't need to muck about with durations. But the actual gameplay overall is harder, because instead of mucking about with durations, you have to muck about with other cards to make Village/Smithy worthwhile. And I'm assuming that the people here already know how the cards work and aren't being confused by the existence of durations...

Whereas playing Fishing Village/Wharf is simple - you buy a bunch of Fishing Villages, a bunch of Wharves, and less treasure than you would with Big Money. You don't NEED any more fun terminals in there to make it work.

[WanderingWinder]

Also, Lab-BM is pretty weak. Actually really weak, as far as BM decks with no other help goes. Lab's real power is that it goes nicely with lots of other stuff (though very rarely is it great, unlike HP).

[ftl]

@philosophyguy -

Do you guys play 2, 3, or 4-player? Some boards may play very differently depending on whether everyone can pick up the cards they need or whether the Minions get split 2-2-3-3 or something.

BTW, If your group needs to get used to synergizing different cards, eventually set up a Menagerie board. (After doing something simple and 2-card) Something like...

Remake, Menagerie, Festival, Horse Traders, Fishing Village, Vault, Haven, Ironworks, Pearl Diver, Bridge.

Or something. Have not playtested that set, just put together what I guessed would go with Menagerie.

[timchen]

I'd start with the simplest of engines: Hunting Party. This engine consists of as many Hunting Parties as possible and 1 Gold and a few Silvers. It doesn't want to buy extra Golds over Hunting Parties (so it's not Big Money which would prefer as many Golds as possible).

The next step is an engine with 2 parts like Fishing Village/Wharf. It has the +Action, +Buy and +Cards needed to build an engine and it will only want a few Golds (2 most of the time). This engine performs best building towards double Province.

Then you can start adding engines with trashers (to enable Conspirator engines that require thin decks...)

And then there are the Remake/Upgrade decks that are constantly rebuilding themselves (to me the ones I understand the least)

And many many more...

I disagree...

First step should be something with trashing. Have Chapel on board, put in a village, a drawer, and an attack, an engine should win against any BM variant. This is to show the basic situation where an engine is clearly better.

After this one can transit to FV-Wharf stuff, where an engine is better only due to the sheer strength of the engine parts. At this point one can start to get a feel when an engine is viable.

Then one can go further into specialized cases, ex., hunting parties, in the sense that the special property of the card makes the build different and viable. Or one can start to think about intricate ones, such as village+remodel+smithy.

[philosophyguy]

We play about 40%/30%/30% 2/3/4 player. At this point, I'm looking for a basic practical and conceptual understanding of engine play, rather than the specifics of "this engine will work in 2 player but not in 4 for X reasons."

[ftl]

Well, in 4-player you just want to make sure that you don't do demos with an engine where everyone will run out of engine components because there's 4 people and only one village or something like that.

[Geronimoo]

I disagree...

First step should be something with trashing. Have Chapel on board, put in a village, a drawer, and an attack, an engine should win against any BM variant. This is to show the basic situation where an engine is clearly better.

So you only need a Chapel, a Village, an attack and a drawer.... Yes, that's a a basic situation that will come up a lot... 

[Davio]

Do something with Menagerie...
Ben Warden vs Davio

Rarely have I seen someone manage his menagerie this perfectly, he manages to have it "hit" 20 times!

It's hard to put into the words the feeling of playing against such a great player. You know you can't make any mistakes, you have to manipulate your deck perfectly, you have to do the VP count in your head and you have to manipulate the end game. So damn tough.

Sure, you can create a Village + Drawer combo, but I think it's more fun to incorporate something like Menagerie.
Menagerie + Hamlet for example is a nice one.