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[tko]

In Turn 11 of this game (http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110830-191019-f2376d0a.html#tko-show-turn-11, I almost bought a Duchy.

I know I made a mistake in this game on Turn 5 getting City which should have been either Farming Village (which would be more useful when my deck greens) or a 2nd Merchant Ship (I shouldn't have discounted this on the fact I wanted to avoid colliding terminals - the plus side of a 2nd ship probably outweighed that risk.

To explain my Turn 11 thinking, I felt like it was going to be a back-and-forth Province buy real soon, and I knew I had a decent amount of Gold that I might be able to pull off adding a Duchy there... however, the pragmatic player in me told me that a Duchy would mess up my future Province buys so obviously I needed a Gold to prepare for keeping my average money high.  What do you think?  Is turn 11 to early for a Duchy purchase?

It was a very close game so it's difficult to draw a conclusion.

[Graystripe77]

looks like the way i would've played it. Nice, but could obviously use tweaking.

[rrenaud]

In that game, I'd say yes, turn 11 is too early for a duchy buy.  If you'll have more than one shuffle remaining, the gold is going tend to be worth at least +3 vp when it lifts you from Duchy to Province (on turn 13, it only lifted from Estate to Duchy for +2).   

[tko]

When I said I knew I made a mistake on Turn 5, I think that sums up the issue... the game is usually too short (too few turns) to make a mistake and recover.  In that case, Farming Village > City, though it's only a small  chance it would have made a difference.  I'm not sure about a 2nd Merchant Ship... maybe that was the more appropriate buy, and just live with the possibility of terminal collisions since its duration will help avoid them.

[DG]

How about bureaucrat + merchant ship? People always ask for good bureaucrat kingdoms and if it wasn't for the farming village this might be one of them.

[tko]

I will often champion the Bureaucrat as being great for cases that he's useful (Gardens or Dukes mainly), like I did here.  However, Bureaucrat doesn't at first appear to have potential that Merchant Ship provides, but I see your point, and I'll get to that below.

I am of late giving Farming Village too much credit for both its ooh-shiny value and it's currently my pet-card.  I'll concede that while I was playing both Smugglers and Merchant Ship, I'm not sure +actions was really necessary (big deal if they collide once in a game).

The game was so close that the potential value of a 2nd Merchant Ship may have been outweighed by the incremental advantage of Bureaucrat maintaining my decks treasure ratio while potentially top-decking VP on my opponent's deck - maybe that was the incremental advantage I really needed.