Hey there. So last year I bought Dominion for my wife since it was the best game for 2 players on her Christmas list (others were Ticket To Ride and Munchkin). I was happy because she's not a huge fan of my favorite game, 7 Wonders, because she doesn't like games where she has to think a lot and would rather just have fun with the people she is playing with. I had played Dominion once with my friends and she had played it thrice before. We finally opened it the other night since most other nights we were binge watching shows. Well, we played several games, enjoying it quite a bit. I won most of the games, but she found out she really likes the Witch and beat me with it.
The problem is, neither of us caught onto the possibilities of the cards or the limitations of Coppers. Chapel? Yeah, maybe if the other player has a Witch and you want to get rid of the Curses. What good is it otherwise? We considered it one of the worst cards in the game. She always bought an Estate when she couldn't afford anything else, bought a Copper whenever she couldn't afford that, and always used extra buys on Coppers. If I played Thief and took one of her Coppers, I'd be happy and she'd be bummed. Then she'd do the same to me. It was completely backwards, but we were having fun. We never trashed anything and got huge, bloated decks with lots of terminal collision and the games took a while.
After the first game, which we played as the recommended first game, I looked at the cards of that kingdom to see what I could have done better and the Village and Smithy stood out to me. I immediately thought of buying a bunch of those. "That would be insane!" I thought. But none of the other randomly-generated kingdoms we played after that contained any Villages, and the one that had a Festival didn't have any draw that I remember, so I didn't get to try it out.
So then, like I do when I get into something, I went online to read some strategy and naturally came upon this site. Using Chapel to trash all your opening cards once you get a Silver? How could that possibly be good? Wouldn't you just have a bunch of hands without any money? Wait, but without those opening cards, you only have the cards you bought, which is hardly any by that point. So you draw that Silver and remaining coppers all the time, then other Silvers you bought, and... (mind blown). My wife knew I had read about it online and she was immediately disappointed. That meant I'd get much better at a much faster rate than she would and it wouldn't be fun anymore. She doesn't like reading strategy articles and for the most part, doesn't like thinking about the game when she's not sitting down to play it.
Well, next time we played there was a Village and Smithy and I tried out my previous idea, combined with Chapeling and I completely dominated. She said, kind of tragically, "Well, I guess you found a better way to play." When we brought it to my parents' house and introduced my mom and brother-in-law to it, we played First Kingdom again and I made another Village/Smithy/Market/Militia engine. My turns took a lot longer than everyone else's and with most of my Actions being Village, Smithy, or Market, it seemed to my wife that I was just doing a bunch of pointless Actions that didn't amount to anything or benefit me in any way. I even ended the game by Remodeling a Province when there were 2 left, then buying the last one. To her that seemed like a jerk move. That's not the way to have fun. That's the way to win at any cost.
She still wants to play, but I fear that she will want to less and less if I keep playing this way. I think to her, she thought it was the kind of game that was meant to be played the way she and her friends played it, and if it turns out that it is the kind of game that is meant to be played how I do, she won't like it much anymore. I think she feels like I'm finding loopholes in the rules that weren't meant to be exploited, like finding a glitch in a video game that lets you skip to the last level instead of playing through the whole game like how you are supposed to. I don't know if she will want to learn how to play it better. I've already told her about the BM strategy and she didn't like the sound of that, either. I don't want to keep playing in a way that she will view as me just being difficult and almost cheating, when, in her mind, things would be so much better and more fun if I just played it like everyone else she knows and not always trying to be different and disrupting the status quo.
Of course, this could just be me over-analyzing and making a mountain out of a mole hill and maybe she would really like to know a better way to play. Has anyone encountered a similar situation? What happened and how did it go?
