Luck. Who needs it? amirite?
We’ve all had games where we’re just need to buy that last province to bring home the win only to look down at $7. Twice. In a game with as much shuffling as Dominion, there is understandably a lot of luck involved.
So what exactly is luck? It is everything outside of the control of the players involved. In my definition, anything that can’t be attributed to skill, is attributed to luck. And vice versa. It is often said that good players create their own luck. Well, a more technically accurate way of saying this is that skilled play often looks like luck to the unskilled. I say skilled play and not skilled players, because skilled players are often capable of incredible feats of incompetence from time to time. Also saying skilled players wouldn’t make grammatical sense. Anyway, over a large enough sample, every single person has exactly the same, neutral, luck. If you think others tend to get luckier than you, either you just aren’t as good as you think or you are bad at recognizing luck. Speaking of which...
You Are Bad at Recognizing LuckThe human psyche is wrought with cognitive biases. The important ones for right now though are the
self serving bias,
outcome bias, and
negativity bias. Additionally, you are generally quite poor when it comes to
assessing randomness. When taken together this means that you tend to attribute positive results to your own skill and negative results to opponent's good luck. And you will have a tendency to remember the ‘bad beats’ (either real or perceived) more than your own good fortune. And the really cool part, knowing that you have a tendency to do this doesn’t stop you from doing it. Also knowing that knowing this doesn’t stop you from doing this. And knowing that knowing that knowing … you get the idea. You’re still going to do this.
Discerning Luck from SkillSo how do we decide where in the luck/skill dichotomy a result falls? Well, the primary way is through experience. The more familiar you are with the game, the better you get at separating the two. For instance, a new player might complain that their treasure maps didn’t collide. But an experienced player knows that the odds of treasure maps colliding any time soon without support aren’t all that great. However, for a good number of example cases we have basic probability on our side. So we can more accurately assess the chances of certain events succeeding and get an objective feel for some measure of luck. More on that in a bit. First, how do we deal with our fortunes.
Deal With ItIf you find yourself in the enviable position of favor with the Luck Gods, how do you press your advantage? For the most part, you don’t actually need to do anything special. Keep an eye on your opponent but keep using your better deck to attack more, build economy faster, and grab more points in the end game. Early good luck tends to snowball into wins. Late good luck tends to just end the game with a win. There are however, times when particularly good fortune presents an interesting opportunity. An unexpected 5 copper hand in the midgame? Buy that Mint and do your happy dance. Turn 3 $7 hand? Expand or Forge could be your friend even if you wouldn’t normally buy them later. Indeed, good fortune can enable strategies and engines which would never be viable normally, but become amazing when just the right conditions are met. Keep an eye out for these.
Conversely, if you find yourself in probabilistic deep water, maybe even before you’ve made a single decision, what do you do? Well, you have a few options. Though keep in mind, if you find yourself in a hole, you probably aren’t winning anyway. Have Fun!
Curse the Fates: Sometimes helps, though often the Fates just decide to screw with you even more. This option is not mutually exclusive with the following ones.
Hope for the best: Especially when there is a clearly dominant strategy, you really just have to hope luck swings to your side. Or maybe that your opponent makes a mistake. Maybe you opponent's Mountebank and Chapel will fall to turn 5? Probably not though.
Try a different strategy: Sometimes there are competing strategies which are viable. This might be a good time to experiment. You could also try a higher variance, high risk, high reward strategy.
Assume Good Luck: This applies mostly to late game. Figure out what you need to win and assume your opponent wont steal it from you. If you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy the penultimate province, decide whether you need just one or both to win. If it’s both, well you have to hope the other guy can’t snag the other first.
Specific ExamplesIt would take too much pixel ink to go over every instance of luck in the game. I’m giving what I feel are the most important. It’s not comprehensive so please feel free to add anything you want in the comments.
First Turn Advantage: There is a lot of debate about exactly how much first turn advantage is worth, and it varies from board to board, but it is quite significant. For reference, my winning percentage in games where I go first is 8.9 percentage points higher than in games where I go second.
The opening split: There is a 27.8% chance that both players do not get the same opening split. (And this is even more exaggerated when Noble Brigand and Nomad Camp are in play). Most boards favor either a 4/3 or a 5/2 opening to some extent. In fact, some strategies are only possible with one split or the other (Mint/Fool’s Gold comes to mind). This means that in more than a quarter of games, one player is given an advantage simply by how good they are at stacking the deck.
Missing the reshuffle (openings): The opening buys are often structured by what you want on turns 3 and 4. but sometimes you never even see those cards until turn 5. The odds are fairly low (26.7% for one missing, 1.7% that both missing) but the results can be devastating.
Missing the reshuffle (general): In the general case, you want to play your good cards as often as possible. Barring several unique cases, the most you will see a card is once per shuffle. But if a card falls to the bottom of the pile, you miss one play of it. Especially early and with good cards, these misses can have a large snowballing effect.
Terminal Collisions: Terminal collision odds can be found
here. In an optimal terminal/deck size ratio, you still expect a few collisions, especially early. If you don’t get them, you got lucky. If you get more than expected, you got the opposite. Congrats.
Turns 3 and 4: I’d recommend reading the forum posts on openings.
Part 1 and
Part 2. If you open silver/silver, the odds of drawing a $6 hand on turns 3 or 4 is 42.4%. Hitting Gold (or Goons!) is somewhat lucky, but can be hugely beneficial. Additionally, if there’s a $5 you really want, you have a 91.2% chance of getting it. So to open silver/silver and not get your Witch is quite unlucky (and often game over). Opening things which don’t guarantee $2 (Fishing Village, Spice Merchant, Salvager, Loan, etc. ) decreases your chances by varying amounts. So keep that in mind during the first two turns.
The Potion Cards: A special case of the above. When opening potion/silver your chances of missing 2P, 3P or 4P are 18.3%, 34.5%, and 66.3%, respectively. And particularly in the case of Familiar, it could very well be game over if you miss. So don’t do it.
Swingy Cards: Some cards are simply higher variance than others, but can’t often be overlooked due to their strength. Familiar, Swindler, Tournament, Embassy, Mountebank - I’m looking at you. My Mountebank hits 5 for 5 and you get 1 for 4? Tough cookies. Deal with it.
Overpaying: Generally, you don’t want to pay more than you have to for something. This doesn't mean you should never overspend. Indeed it’s often the correct play. But for instance when there’s a critical $5 card, you’d much rather your opening split be 5/5 instead of 6/4. This is also true when you’re paying $7 for Duchies and Golds (usually when you’d rather have a province).
The Midgame: By far the hardest part of the game to judge luck is in the midgame. So much so that I don’t really have any general tips for you. Well maybe this: If you’re building an engine, pay attention to your deck composition at any given turn. What are the odds of drawing all the key engine components you need on any given turn?
End Game: And finally, we come to the end of things. The most obvious and frustrating possibility of luck is failure to draw enough to buy a province. But before you go crying bad luck from drawing a couple of $7’s in a row, consider you may in fact have beaten the odds to get even that much. Check your final deck composition. If your average $/card is much less than 1.6, don’t be expecting too many provinces. Also, if you find you have to spend $13 for a province, you’ve also likely been unlucky.
ConclusionsBad luck sucks.
