So, I finally got to play a bit of Dark Ages! Got to play 3 games!
The first was 5-player with 10 random dark ages cards. There were some fun interactions between Ironmonger and Mystic. Also, Wandering Minstrel and Mystic. Pretty fun.
The second was also 5-player and was one of the Dark Ages/ Base recommended sets. I went for an approach with Rats and Remodel and was able to get quite a bit of Gold. My brother attempted the same but just got unlucky. However, the existence of Knights proved to be quite a nuisance as I tried to build a deck of nothing but Gold while all my cards were getting trashed. Not fun. However, it does seem that Rats + TfB is a viable strategy. Also, the benefits of the knights aren't really that important. The guy who won ignored the fancy tricks and bought Duchies starting super early.
The third had a bunch of different cards and was probably the most interesting. It was a 4 player game and had Lighthouse, Beggar, Warehouse, Bishop, Gardens, Cache, Contraband, Catacombs, King's Court and Expand. Three of us opened Bishop-Warehouse and of the three, two of us just wanted to shut down the fourth player who got a 5/2 and went with Cache/Beggar, obviously heading into Gardens. It really just came down to who transitioned best out of the Bishop start, with the Gardens player only getting 5 Gardens (the other 7 going to Bishops) worth 4 VP each.
