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[Águia Branca]

Let's start a thread talking about Dominion in paper. Do you play it? If so, how?

I prefer to play with two friends at a time. Two player Dominion is great, but a bit chess-like (competitive and not as chill). Four player Dominion has everyone wait too long for their turn and often makes interesting strategies less viable because piles are so limited.

Over time, we have retired many of the cards I own for various reasons. Engines are beloved online because they're considered very skill-testing. They often involve many tactical decisions, especially in the end game. However, in relatively casual paper play, they're best enjoyed infrequently, because they can lead to long, awkward solitaire turns. To me and my friends, strategic considerations are often more fun than tactical ones, anyway. So we actively tried to make engines less dominant and have strategies which would be considered fringe online be more frequently viable. To this end, we play with very few draw cards. We also play with few (other) strong money enablers, because money isn't particularly exciting to play, either. This leaves us with a higher chance to see stuff like rushes, non-engine megaturns, golden decks, slogs, weird Counting House combos, Silver pileouts, Double Tactician goodness, as well as the occasional board that ends in a hilarious stalemate thanks to Embargo and Pirate Ship spam.

We play with ten randomized cards, including Platinum, Colony and landscapes. This means Platinum usually appears without Colony and vice versa. This way, even if you are playing a moneyish strategy, it's an interesting decision whether or not to go for either card. If landscapes appear in a big clump, there are sometimes boards with as few as five actual kingdom cards. This further limits the viability of engines and makes paper play even more different from online play.

Thanks for reading the ravings of this filthy casual. How many people do you play with? Do you use all the cards you own or do you pick and choose? Do you have any house rules?

[Snorka]

I play paper Dominion fairly regularly. Usually I play 2-player with hand-selected kingdoms. We always use 10 kingdom cards and 0-2 landscapes, and we usually test out some of my custom cards. Almost every game is an engine of some variety. We usually start by picking a couple of cards with some unique interaction, then adding in any missing engine pieces(i.e. village, draw, thinning, +buy) that don’t invalidate the central conceit of the kingdom. Then any remaining space is filled with fun cards. Mainstays of the fun card slot are Chariot Race, Ironworks, Remodel, Throne Room, Castles, and attacks of all varieties.
As for retiring cards, I can’t say we’ve fully retired anything. Kings Court and Bridge and Chapel are sometimes cards. Weaksauce cards like Pirate Ship or Counting House or Chancellor usually only show up in games specifically built around making them good.

[BryGuy]

I was playing physical Dominion for the past few years, but the kids are now all in college. One player almost always uses Big Money strategy, one almost always goes for an engine, me and another try to find the best strategy. The kids seam to do better than the adults.

We always play with 10 Kingdom card piles and 0-2 Horizontals. I use dominionrandomizer.com to decide 7-10 of the piles and fil-in the rest manually, often with custom-made cards. I play with two Kingdom cards/pile/player for non-Victory piles.

I only play three to five players for we have much better two player games and why make six people suffer when i have enough material for two three plyer games.

Platinum and Colony rarely come out, as most Kingdom's don't have five piles from Prosperity. Also they are slightly problematic and were soft banned for a while - people were ignoring Provinces.

[allanfieldhouse]

Platinum and Colony rarely come out, as most Kingdom's don't have five piles from Prosperity. Also they are slightly problematic and were soft banned for a while - people were ignoring Provinces.

That's not a problem, that's just how Colony usually works. It's like saying Province is bad to include in normal games because people keep ignoring Duchy.

Also, that's not how most people choose to include Colony/Platinum. The usual way is to base it in the proportion of Prosperity cards. So if you have 3 Prosperity cards, you should have a 30% chance of using them. The easy way to do this is to take your 10 Kingdom randomizer cards and randomly draw one. If it's Prosperity, use P/C. Or just let your randomizer app roll the dice for you.

[Madseason]

We use a lot of house rules, usually in three or four player games.  Regardless of any Prosperity cards, we do coin tosses to decide whether to include Colonies and Platinum.  We generally use 10 kingdom piles, but will go as high as 12, and will almost always include 1-2 landscapes.  Every expansion is fair game; no banned cards.  Often we will focus on a single expansion.  I have a different house rule question, wondering how folks feel about this:  Since Allies, it's always bothered my that there were so few opportunities to draw a Liaison card to gain a favor from a random selection from all existing kingdom cards (it's not so bad if one restricts oneself to using just Allies cards).  The same problem now applies to Omens/Prophecies.  We have begun just randomly marking a kingdom pile or two with a token, so that when you play a card from the marked pile, one gains a favor/or removes a sun token from a Prophecy.  This tactic hugely expands the use of favors/prophecies to base and all expansions.  In principle, it could be used in other scenarios, such as turning any kingdom into a Night card.  Thoughts of pros and cons???

[Erick648]

One change we make is to Black Market.  It's great in online play, but when using physical sets (especially when you have most or all of the sets), it can have almost as much setup/cleanup time as the rest of the game combined.  So instead we replace the Black Market deck with five face-up Events.  This makes the extra setup and cleanup negligible, but still captures the general flavor of "access to stuff that's not in the Kingdom."

[Águia Branca]

I have a different house rule question, wondering how folks feel about this:  Since Allies, it's always bothered my that there were so few opportunities to draw a Liaison card to gain a favor from a random selection from all existing kingdom cards (it's not so bad if one restricts oneself to using just Allies cards).  The same problem now applies to Omens/Prophecies.  We have begun just randomly marking a kingdom pile or two with a token, so that when you play a card from the marked pile, one gains a favor/or removes a sun token from a Prophecy.  This tactic hugely expands the use of favors/prophecies to base and all expansions.  In principle, it could be used in other scenarios, such as turning any kingdom into a Night card.  Thoughts of pros and cons???

Sounds good if you're really into Allies/Prophecies and want to play with them all the time. Not sure about Night cards though. There is a reason there is only a handful of Night cards in the game. You don't usually get much out of +Cards, +Actions, +$ or +Buy in the Night phase. So that leaves you broadly with gainers, Remodel variants, trash-for-no-benefit and attacks. Most gainers and Remodel variants are more interesting in the action phase because of gain-and-play. Since Night cards do not require an action to be played, this would also make some cards quite a bit more powerful. There are still a handful of cards that could arguably benefit from being made into Night cards. Horn of Plenty, Villain and Sea Hag come to mind. Horn of Plenty plays like a Night card already and I never liked Treasure cards that don't give +$. Villain and Sea Hag would fit thematically and are relatively weak, so they stand to benefit from becoming Night cards.