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[Ichimaru Gin]

I remember my first game of Dominion. It was in a study room in the library of my school.
It was me, my older brother and his friend--who was introducing us to the game for the first time.
We did not play with the starting set, yet I still recall some of the cards on the table: throne room, witch, militia, laboratory.
The first kingdom card I bought was a witch--my brother's was a laboratory. I couldn't seem to understand why silver cost $3 when it only gave you $2, or why copper cost $0, it just seemed so strange. Why would you ever buy something that gave you less money than it cost? Eventually I realized that I was able to keep these cards even when I "spent" them. To tell the truth, I don't think my brother's friend was that great of a player--but he will always stand out as the person who introduced me to *the* game.
I can't remember who won that first game, but I do remember what it sparked in my mind.
The next week, while I was at work, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And, within the week, I purchased the Base set and began playing with my family.
Now, two and half years and 5 expansions later, I've come a long way from that first game. But the nice thing about Dominion is that every time is different--every kingdom offers a new insight into the marvelously complex interactions between the cards. Add more expansions, and it only gets better.
Anyway, just an amateur reminiscing about his first game.
Feeling the nostalgia yet?
Why don't you post something about your first game and where you are now.

[liopoil]

my first game was a four player game, none of us had played before. It was the first game kingdom - except we accidentally used chapel instead of village... which was a big deal. We did the normal thing of buying random action cards and having tons of terminal collision. One player bought remodel and decided that it was a bad card. So they bought chapel purely to trash the remodel. The chapel was never in the same hand as the remodel and so it was never played. About halfway through the game, we had pretty big decks and nobody had bought any provinces... and we weren't much closer to getting them. I decided to start buying only money, because actions wasn't working out. A few turns later everyone else joined me. Our decks were so bad that it took a while to build up, we almost emptied the gold pile. In the end, I got to the provinces first because I started buying money first, and won.

[A Drowned Kernel]

I can't remember if it was the first game I played but it was one of the first- Adventurer was on the board, and everyone else was ignoring it in favor of gold, and I thought "hey this card looks cool", so I bought it and ended up winning (probably by luck, everyone playing was still in the "buy random actions" phase of learning Dominion). For a long time after that I had a very inflated opinion of the card, and I still have a certain fondness for it.

[Awaclus]

My first game was a 2p game against my older sister at around 1am and I was extremely tired. Council Room was in it and it caused terminal collisions which made me irritated. That's all I can remember, I probably lost but I have no memory of that.

[brokoli]

My first game was… on BGA. My opponent bought only markets at $5, $6 or $7, so I thought market was a very powerful card.

But after, I was so curious that I wanted to try different strategies, even if I would alway lose against market. At first, I thought each card had its own strategy, so I tried many of them, like "Double Mine" : Two mines, no other terminals, but yet treasures, cantrips or villages. Actually, I was not far from the truth, and even if Double-Mine is a very poor strategy, it was not a bad way to think of strategies in Dominion, because we have things like Smithy-BM, or Double Jack…

[Jean-Michel]

The only thing I remember from my first game is that it had Woodcutter. I loved that card. "This has to be strictly better than silver, both give +$2 but Woodcutter also gives a Buy!

[Davio]

It took some time to hit the table in our group, because we thought it would be a very complex Risk-style game based on the name.

So we played it with 4 players and it ended up being a quite simple card game, I don't remember well what I did, but I think I bought too many action cards, but also quite a decent amount of money.

Basically, I played as as simulator: I have X to spend, let's buy a card costing exactly X if possible. I underestimated Duchies and overvalued Coppers. Heck, I think we all had many Thiefs and such, which are actually quite nice in multiplayer.

[RTT]

my first game was with my sister. none of us knew the game and it was the intrigue box. i started with a great hall and thought this would get me forward. there was also upgrade and i thought it was a stupid card as it weakens your actual turn. we bought way to many terminals and had collisions everywhere. also we played as 2 player with 12 provinces because i havent read that rule. so the game took about 2 hrs until we were able to buy all provinces.

I won

[terminalCopper]

I offered Dominion to myself my wife last christmas, and we tried the suggested "first game kingdom". We had not read the 3-pile-rule, and we got all markets, villages and smithies before going for provinces. We both had about 50 kingdom cards in the end, and concluded in the second game, that gardens were comically underpriced.

I won

Congratulations!

[serakfalcon]

I offered Dominion to myself my wife last christmas, and we tried the suggested "first game kingdom". We had not read the 3-pile-rule, and we got all markets, villages and smithies before going for provinces. We both had about 50 kingdom cards in the end, and concluded in the second game, that gardens were comically underpriced.

I won

Congratulations!

I lost!!! and i had been winning for like, a year now...

[mail-mi]

I lost the game.

[greatexpectations]

my first game of dominion was played while a number of lovely young ladies baked and then served me delicious fresh apple pie. i distinctly remember playing a version of smithy/BM (only bought smithy, money, VP) that could have been beaten by a BM bot programmed by a toddler. i spent most of the game trying to watch the other players to learn some strategy while trying to not mess up shuffling my deck. i did not win, but i liked it enough that i ended up playing almost 5000 more games after that.

[terminalCopper]

my first game of dominion was played while a number of lovely young ladies baked and then served me delicious fresh apple pie.

You mean, you had some real life before playing dominion?

[shark_bait]

Workshop is broken because it just let's you get cards for free.  Obviously because it's so OP gaining cards in your action phase via Workshop counts as your buy phase....

Yeah, I'll take my walk of shame for that one.  It really happened.

[pedroluchini]

A friend of mine wanted to show me this totally cool board game, so he brought over the base set and we played a few games. I had been shown Munchkin just the night before, and (being new to the whole board game thing) I thought that was really fun and Dominion was kind of boring.

Yeah. [facepalm.jpg]

Anyway, that friend (bless his soul) kept insisting to play Dominion and the game slowly grew on me. It was not until I played a few games on Isotropic with all the expansions that I was truly hooked, though.

[ftl]

I remember my first game was a 4-player game, and 3 of us opened with Woodcutter and would always take copper on our spare buys (because we can get more cards for free, it was great!)

[heatthespurs]

- 4 players Base game
- Buying random actions (6VP fairground definitely)
- Woodcutter: Strictly better than silver!
- Spy: Piles run out quickly. Discarding other people copper while keeping own copper on top of deck.
- Library: Untouched – what is the value of not drawing some particular action card?
- Thief: Strong (which is not totally incorrectly in 4-player game) and fun
- Use +buy to buy extra copper, countering thief attack
- Use +buy to give curse to other player (hey, why we need the curse pile in no-witch game otherwise?!)
- Game ended on piles (no one have the economy to get the province)

[florrat]

If you assume you can do this

- Use +buy to give curse to other player (hey, why we need the curse pile in no-witch game otherwise?!)

Then this is a pretty logical conclusion

- Woodcutter: Strictly better than silver!

[jonts26]

my first game of dominion was played while a number of lovely young ladies baked and then served me delicious fresh apple pie. i distinctly remember playing a version of smithy/BM (only bought smithy, money, VP) that could have been beaten by a BM bot programmed by a toddler. i spent most of the game trying to watch the other players to learn some strategy while trying to not mess up shuffling my deck. i did not win, but i liked it enough that i ended up playing almost 5000 more games after that.

I remember that game. It wasn't too long after my first. Which I think was a mix of seaside (which was new at the time) and base. I don't remember the specifics other than I didn't win.

[KingZog3]

My first game I built a crazy engine using workshop to gain Smithys and Villages, and used Markets to double Provinces every turn. I was such a beast...

[Watno]

I'm not exactly sure when, but I think I might be the person around here who started playing Dominion first.
My first game was in October '08, buying random cards in the first game set. I loved it and I think I played quite a lot of games in a row that day.

[TheMirrorMan]

My first game was actually on BSW. I was wondering : hey, what's all this fuss about this weird cardgame ? Played with an opponent with whom I talked a bit and even apologized that probably I was going to do weird stuff. Observations :

* Chapel : why would anyone wanna buy this ?
* Militia : love it (agressive player here )
* Oooh villages. I want to do as much as possible!!!
* Library : well, seems weird. Let's check this out. Ugh what an awful card.
* Buying festivals instead of markets even when there is no draw.
* And of course ... Why would anyone wanna buy money ? I mean those actions give you enough extra money and you've got already $7 in your deck right ? Should be enough to get to $8 easily!

[markusin]

Uhh...I don't really remember what happened on my first game of Dominion. I know that my sister was the one teaching us to play, it was a 3-player game, and it was the "First game" board. We got some Militias, bought a bunch of money, and had fun playing a bunch of games after that.

In the beginning, I was the guy who tended to buy too many terminals Thief before quickly realizing that was a bad idea. I was also the bold one who would buy Chancellor, Council Room, Library, and Gardens at times. My sister liked her treasures, and her boyfriend liked his Villages and Festivals (especially with Smithy on the board). Things started getting tough when the bf began buying Laboratories a lot. I knew something was up with that card. Truly, there was stylistic diversity in our games. Thankfully, We all thought Gold was awesome, so our games would always end on Provinces reasonably quickly, even when we would all get Witch.
 
My sister and I didn't see the value of trashing at all until we started playing on Isotropic. Sadly, she doesn't play anymore.

[allanfieldhouse]

My first game (4 players):
None of us bought chapel (because there were no curses).
Markets seemed to be everyone's favorite because of how many different things they gave you.
We didn't have a village, so I was amazed when another player throne roomed a market and could then play two more actions.
I bought a couple coppers near the end once I discovered you could buy them for 0.
I tied for first with 27 points -- which I soon discovered was a very common score.

[jsh357]

I was playing 4p with some friends on isotropic.  I remember the game had Familiar and Wishing Well.  I didn't understand that gained cards went in the discard or that money wasn't used up.  (Always have to explain this to people I teach too)  My friend told me attacks suck and to just go for cards with +Card +Action on them.  I was taught by the cantrip idiot.  I bought a lot of Wishing Wells and kept trying to wish for cards, not understanding I had to have bought them first.  Somehow, the game was intriguing enough to me after this that I kept playing it.

[liopoil]

isotropic is awesome and everything, but learning how to play dominion on it doesn't sound like much fun...

[Kirian]

Then we had a threesome. I am guessing my story is unique in that respect.

That is more information than I needed or expected, yet I suspect your story is not necessarily unique.  It might be unique among people on the forum though.

[SCSN]

I quit my first game of Dominion on T1 because I had no idea what I was supposed to do. A friend had accidentally sent me a link to isotropic (meant for someone else) without any kind of instruction. Thus my Dominion career was borne out of a misclick.

[Watno]

You're the guy who needed a while to find out a physical implementation of Dominion exists, right?

[sitnaltax]

My first game was a demo with a prototype at Origins; I believe this was 2007. The rumor mill told me to look out for Rio Grande's "Game X", which had recently been also demoed at the Gathering of Friends. The copy we played was Xerox/laser-print on colored paper with a card in sleeves--green for the VP cards, white for the Actions, etc. The VP symbol was a crown. I remember Valerie was there and I think she taught; I don't remember who else was around. I believe the Kingdom we used was the same 10 cards that we all know as the typical introductory Kingdom. I don't remember the outcome of the game, but I remember we all made the novice mistake of overbuying terminals and then of course scrambling for Villages. I remember thinking the game needed an equal-turns rule. (I've since recanted, of course, but I don't think it's destructive for a 3p/4p game with novices.) We talked briefly after the game about some other cards and the demoer told us about their favorite strategy (Chapel-based deck-thinning) and the strategy we would eventually know as Turbo Remodel.

Man, that was the start of a long awesome journey.

[Sidsel]

Our first game (2p with my husband) was from the base set, that I'd found on sale just before christmas. Noone to teach us, and so a) we thought gardens were supposed to be in every game (like the other VP cards), and b) I thought we had to empty all the green piles. Gardens ended up at 7vp each (wow, cheap province!), and the game took over two hours. Can't remember who won.

We also thought chapel was only good for curses, and I didn't learn better before reading the Dominion strategy webpage.

[Awaclus]

isotropic is awesome and everything, but learning how to play dominion on it doesn't sound like much fun...

I learned Innovation on Isotropic. It would have been a pain without the excellent tutorial on the forums. I can only imagine how horrible learning Dominion would've been.

[Davio]

isotropic is awesome and everything, but learning how to play dominion on it doesn't sound like much fun...

I learned Innovation on Isotropic. It would have been a pain without the excellent tutorial on the forums. I can only imagine how horrible learning Dominion would've been.

Nah, Dominion isn't that hard, especially the base set.
You just have to follow your ABCD.
A is for Action
B is for Buy
C is Clean-Up
(D is for Duration?)

[Grujah]

D is draw.

[Drab Emordnilap]

Then we had a threesome. I am guessing my story is unique in that respect.

That is more information than I needed or expected, yet I suspect your story is not necessarily unique.  It might be unique among people on the forum though.

It isn't, for the record.

[Lekkit]

A 4 player game with a friend who had played before. I can't remember who won, but I'm guessing the friend who knew what he was doing. It was base only with him selecting a beginner friendly kingdom. Market was clearly broken, as was Village. A week later we played again, this time with Prosperity and Intrigue mixed in. Over a month or so we bought the rest of the expansions, and found isotropic. A lot of Dominion was played then.

[SCSN]

You're the guy who needed a while to find out a physical implementation of Dominion exists, right?

Yah, I learned of isotropic's cumbersome cousin upon googling "Dominion strategy", finding the eponymous blog and seeing all that strange artwork.

isotropic is awesome and everything, but learning how to play dominion on it doesn't sound like much fun...

I learned Innovation on Isotropic. It would have been a pain without the excellent tutorial on the forums. I can only imagine how horrible learning Dominion would've been.

Imagine learning it with all sets at once and no prior experience!

Tbh, it wasn't actually that hard, even though it took quite a while to learn all cards by their actions. By far the most important thing when learning something new is to just do it, then do it some more and then do even more of it. Online Dominion is a much more natural fit for this than the cardboard implementation, with which you'd be able to play at most 10-15 games/day.

[Ozle]

I remember mine, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

[KingZog3]

I remember mine, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

Death. Death lasts forever.

[Ozle]

I remember mine, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

Death. Death lasts forever.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22362835

Or not...

[sudgy]

I remember mint, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

FTFY

[florrat]

I remember mint, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

FTFY

Where is the downvote button?

[Kirian]

I remember mint, got it from the local five and dime. We played it till my fingers bled, me and some guys from school

When i look back now, that summer seemed to last forever. Those were the best days of my life.
But i guess nothing ever last forever

FTFY

Kirian has punched you in the nuts

[forestplay]

First game was last Sunday.  I bought this game a couple of years ago and it's been sitting on a shelf since.  I usually buy a few games at Christmas that are highly rated to give as gifts, typically Mensa award winners.  Recent favorites have been Quirkle, Pentago and Quarto.  Dominion was so different, it sat literally unopened for two years.

Last weekend my wife said she wanted to learn this game because the box was interesting.  Complete newbies, both of us, it took a while to work through that first game.  We played the suggested first game twice, then moved to the other suggested games, playing each twice.  We are loving Dominion more with each time.  We ordered our first expansion pack: Seaside.

This has us so excited about game playing, we went to a "Game" store were we know people play occasionally.  We found out that Thursday nights are the adult game nights and we plan to go tonight to see if anyone will play with Dominion beginners.

-Bob

[KingZog3]

First game was last Sunday.  I bought this game a couple of years ago and it's been sitting on a shelf since.  I usually buy a few games at Christmas that are highly rated to give as gifts, typically Mensa award winners.  Recent favorites have been Quirkle, Pentago and Quarto.  Dominion was so different, it sat literally unopened for two years.

Last weekend my wife said she wanted to learn this game because the box was interesting.  Complete newbies, both of us, it took a while to work through that first game.  We played the suggested first game twice, then moved to the other suggested games, playing each twice.  We are loving Dominion more with each time.  We ordered our first expansion pack: Seaside.

This has us so excited about game playing, we went to a "Game" store were we know people play occasionally.  We found out that Thursday nights are the adult game nights and we plan to go tonight to see if anyone will play with Dominion beginners.

-Bob

That's great! It's nice to have real people to play with. Most people here play online, but I used to play with some friends. If you're willing to play online, I would be interested in playing some with you, as I'm sure many people here would.

[ashersky]

That's great! It's nice to have real people to play with. Most people here play online, but I used to play with some friends. If you're willing to play online, I would be interested in playing some with you, as I'm sure many people here would.

Someone take this to the out of context thread.

[scott_pilgrim]

my first game of dominion was played while a number of lovely young ladies baked and then served me delicious fresh apple pie.

Hey, that's the same as my first game of Dominion!

Unfortunately in my case, that number was zero.

[mail-mi]

my first game of dominion was played while a number of lovely young ladies baked and then served me delicious fresh apple pie.

Hey, that's the same as my first game of Dominion!

Unfortunately in my case, that number was zero.

Hey, I have that same shirt! Except its blue and it's a pair of pants.

[ipofanes]

That's great! It's nice to have real people to play with. Most people here play online, but I used to play with some friends. If you're willing to play online, I would be interested in playing some with you, as I'm sure many people here would.

Someone take this to the out of context thread.

Someone take this to the adult game night next Thursday.

[Kirian]

That's great! It's nice to have real people to play with. Most people here play online, but I used to play with some friends. If you're willing to play online, I would be interested in playing some with you, as I'm sure many people here would.

Someone take this to the out of context thread.

Someone take this to the adult game night next Thursday.

Look upthread, at least two people have already used Dominion as part of their Penthouse Letter.

[Eran of Arcadia]

Way back in November 2012, some friends my wife and I knew from church invited us over to play "Dominion", which they kept describing as if we were supposed to know what it was. Well, we figured it might be worth checking out; we had several games we liked playing with people. So we headed over to their place. There were 5 people; the hosts, us, and one other guy we knew whose wife was absent. We played a couple of games using cards from the base game, Intrigue, and Hinterlands. The temporarily-single guy bought a bunch of Harems, both games, leading to lots of really bad jokes. I bought lots of Traders so I would be safe from curses. And so on.

We liked it so much we wanted to play it again some time. They said that if we got an expansion they didn't have, that would increase the variety we had. They specifically recommended Seaside and warned against Alchemy. So for Christmas 2012, my wife bought me Seaside and the Base Card Set.

Well, somehow, we never ended up playing against them again. And we have since moved halfway across the country. But for Christmas 2013, I got the 5th set (Hinterlands, after Seaside, Dark Ages, Prosperity, and Guilds) which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY. But all those other games we used to play are still boxed up from the move 9 months ago, and we have introduced it to as many people as we can.

[2.71828.....]

which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY.

Check out here or here for some ways to store all the cards.

[Wolphmaniac]

Three-player game with two friends who own base set.  I remember everyone using all extra buys to buy more coppers.  Hey why not, they're free!  I also remember one player buying a Duchy every time she hit $5.  I also remember saying at the end of the game, "I think coppers might actually be a liability" and nobody believing me. 

[KingZog3]

I also remember saying at the end of the game, "I think coppers might actually be a liability" and nobody believing me.

There was so much of this kind of thing in my group. Not just for coppers and Estate trashing, but for all kinds of cards.

[sudgy]

which has pretty much forced me to try to find a better way to store the cards. Digging through 5 boxes is CRAZY.

I have 9 boxes, and I don't find much of a challenge with it.

[Leo1997]

It was a 3-Player Game in November 2009.

My father buys Smithys, and Smithys, and he won.
I have been hating Smithys since that game.

[theory]

The first time I ever thought about Dominion was this email from rrenaud on November 25, 2008: "Nice.  I've played Pandemic, it's pretty fun.  I also have an order of Dominion on the way, though I've never played it."  He was writing in response to this article.

My first several games were with rrenaud and my now-wife Jill at the Google offices.  He had already played the game a few times and had decided upon the Throne Room / Chancellor opening as best, because the Chancellor let you keep reshuffling until you could hit the TR/Chancellor combo for +$4.  Meanwhile, I was asking about the Moneylender card.  My exact words were, "So this is one of those late-game cards, right, where you're just pushing for VP as fast as you can and can afford to throw away your resources?"

Within a week or two, Jill and I had our own copy.  I remember vividly a 2-player game where we didn't realize that you limited the Curses and Provinces in a 2p game.  I had never yet purchased the Witch in a game, and it didn't take long for me to realize what a mistake that was.  That game lasted almost an hour, and I have never since been clobbered that badly in a game of Dominion.  Probably because the rules of 2p Dominion don't actually allow for a score of -27 to 75.

Around this time I discovered BSW, which interested me only insofar as it allowed me to play even more Dominion.  I started out playing with Jill, but soon I was playing so much Jill refused to play with me any more, especially after she discovered I was logging all my games on a spreadsheet and using it to track victory points purchased, as a sort of extremely rudimentary point tracker.  An early lesson learned in how other people do not pursue their hobbies as obsessively as I do.

It didn't slow down my BSW gaming, though.  I studied up on BGG strategy, relying on articles like Schuk's Short Analysis of the 25 Kingdom Cards and Alexfrog's Analyzing a random cardset.  They might be outdated now, but at the time, they were true pearls of wisdom for a player just starting out and who hadn't yet thought about the implications of a Chapel deck.

I played exclusively 2-player base games, given that no expansion had been released yet.  I obsessively tracked my BSW Elo rating and developed a real rivalry with yaron, a fellow 2p Dominion enthusiast who played fast and routinely clobbered me.  By March of 2009, I felt confident enough to write my first Dominion strategy article: Guide to your first two buys.

[to be continued ...]

[2.71828.....]

The Secret History of theory

[Kuildeous]

I bought a lot of Wishing Wells and kept trying to wish for cards, not understanding I had to have bought them first. 

I just love this goof-up so much.

Now I just need to invent a variant of blind zen Dominion. "Now I shall wish for Grand Market. And there it is, which is lucky because the only source of income I have is 7 Coppers…and now a Grand Market"

[theory]

[to be continued ...]

I was somewhat surprised and dismayed that my strategy article wasn’t much of a hit.  In retrospect, I would attribute this to the fact that most of the BGG community is more into “breadthgaming” than “depthgaming”.  If you look at the 100 hottest BGG posts each year, reviews are vastly more popular than strategy articles.  People go to BGG to find out about and play new games -- indeed, I would even submit that for most BGGers, boardgaming is about playing new games, as opposed to just playing games.  In such an environment, the strategy articles that do best were the ones geared towards absolute beginners (like the ones I had linked earlier), or, the 101 survey courses rather than the graduate seminars.  Not that my article was a pearl of unappreciated genius; I certainly feel very differently about it now.  But at the time, I was pretty convinced I knew how to play base Dominion optimally.

In any event, it did push me away from Dominion.  I had already reached #1 on the BSW elo rankings, and although yaron often knocked me out of the top slot, there was not really much left to explore or strive for without a community of like-minded players.  The game was essentially solved -- after 1000 base games, you’re playing on autopilot.

Shortly after I stopped playing in the spring of 2009, Intrigue came out on BSW.  Only a few cards were BSW-enabled, however, and though I tried them out, I had definitely moved on from Dominion.  Over the next year and a half, as new expansions kept coming out, rrenaud consistently made fun of me as the guy who had played base Dominion 1000 times but the expansions less than five times.  I laughed but saw no reason to get back into Dominion: I’d have to buy the expansions and play in person, a real chore compared to playing online.

Isotropic changed everything.  Dominion had the good fortune of releasing both its best expansion and its best implementation near-simultaneously.  In particular, the fact that Prosperity was available on Isotropic but not anywhere else (even in-person) was an unexpected windfall: it drove huge amounts of traffic to Isotropic, attracting players that otherwise wouldn’t be interested in playing online, while simultaneously showing off a kick-ass expansion that made people want Prosperity even more. 

But I think the real reason Isotropic became so wildly successful was that it felt right.  It didn’t feel like some bastardized simulation of a real board game.  No, it felt like Dominion the way it was meant to be played all along.  Rules were implemented cleanly and precisely.  The interface was deliberately minimalistic and got out of your way.  The only thing to focus on was the mental game.  You didn’t waste time with verifying your account, looking up commands, connecting Facebook, hosting tables, or playing bizarre provincial politics metagames.  It distilled Dominion down to its core and eliminated every other possible distraction.  Without such a seamless experience (undoubtedly the result of its alter-ego existence as the hidden Dominion playtest server), you could not imagine a text-based, “Linux-y” board game implementation modestly introduced in a BGG reply becoming a server hosting more than 10,000 games a day.

I was one of those skeptical about Dominion.  At the time, I was playing Keldon’s superb RFTG AI, which is probably how every game designer/publisher envisions their star board game implementation to look like.  “Text Dominion” was not especially exciting to me:

September 12

me: tichu? jill is doing work
Rob: okay
or text mode dominion?
it's suprisngly good..
me: hmm

September 16

me: keldon?
Rob: playing dominion on isotropic
maybe dom > race?
me: lol

But ...

September 17

me: keldon?
Rob: playing games at google
would hack out a quick dominion though
have you tried it?
me: hahaha
no i haven't
Rob: it's actually good
me: link
Rob: i promise
http://dominion.isotropic.org
me: whoa
this is like
funky
can i read the card texts?
ah
yes i cabn

And three days later …

September 20

me: you're right
completely right
isotropic dominion >>>> [RFTG Brink of War]

rrenaud’s subsequent comments proved surprisingly prophetic:

Rob: maybe dominion will have a resurgence?
me: among?
 ppl in general?
 i'm certainly thinking about reading dominion forums now

...

 my experience used to be
 that dominion strat forums were mostly junk
Rob: i mean, you could raise the quality
i've certainly learned stuff from them
me: i'm sure it's improved
 i used to read it during like
 LexH's relentless chancellor pushing days
 SOLUTION TO ALL YOUR PROBLEMS
Rob: heh

Isotropic started destroying our regular boardgame night.  rrenaud (an admitted BSG-aholic) was turning down BSG games so that he could play Isotropic instead.  We signed up for metzgerism’s BGGDL - remember that?  Yaron predictably dominated early on, but soon afterwards all these other people started coming out of the woodwork: Captain_Frisk, guided, DG, timchen, Axxle, mith, etc. etc. 

A month or so after, I sent rrenaud this email:

Subject: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"

Body:  today's entry: haven + explorer + king's court = 10 golds in deck by turn 21

In response, rrenaud writes:

I'd actually be interested in doing something like that.  Maybe take one game from isotropic per day that had something cool happen, given some commentary on the game and the strategy employed, etc.

I think you like haven a lot more than I do.

I really need to make dominionstats.com.

[to be continued ...]

[Ozle]

Woah, i always assumed FDS came before Isotropic...

[SirPeebles]

The Secret History of theory

Modestly introduced in an f.ds reply.

[Grujah]

I bought a lot of Wishing Wells and kept trying to wish for cards, not understanding I had to have bought them first. 

I just love this goof-up so much.

Now I just need to invent a variant of blind zen Dominion. "Now I shall wish for Grand Market. And there it is, which is lucky because the only source of income I have is 7 Coppers…and now a Grand Market"

.. and Grand Market wasn't even in the kingdom.

[shark_bait]

Oh man, I love reading theories posts here.  This reminds me of my introduction to isotropic.  Having gotten hooked on IRL Dominion and convinced of the depth of strategy in this game.  I went to BGG to look up strategy because my friends were not as convinced as I was about how deep the game was.  At the time I was viewing BGG it was the age of Session Reports.  Almost every session report had [isotropic] in the title and consisted of a text log of the entire game.  Not really much of a session report but eventually I said to myself, "Hmmmm, I wonder what this isotropic site is?" 

And that was the moment I opened Pandora's box.  Free time became Dominion time. 

This was before the introduction of the leaderboard so games were more low key.  I knew that I was pretty good as I won more than I lost.  However I knew that I still had lots to learn.  Soon after my introduction to isotropic I saw a player named theory online with a status "dominionstrategy.com".  I took a moment to copy and paste the link into a new tab and was instantly hooked.  I checked the site daily looking for each new post. 

I slowly got better and better.  Soon the leaderboard was introduced and I found myself sitting around level 28/29 and ranked around 200 I think.  At this point in time I approached matches against great players like yaron, yariv, WanderingWinder, Ben Wardon, DG, Obi Wan Bonogi, etc with trepidation as I felt quite over-matched.  Eventually through much practice I obtained the quintessential isotropic level 40 and topped out around 45.  It was at that point where I felt like I could legitimately win any game of Dominion against any opponent.

*Cue entrance of Stef

One afternoon on isotropic I was in the mood for some 3-player games.  I had automatch set to something like +/- 5 making levels 36-46 being present.  I was playing against someone named something like underwater (Lv 36) and another player named Stef (around Lv 38 I think).  We played a total of 3 games and in each game, Stef managed to win while I took 2nd.  I remember thinking to myself that this Stef player certainly seems a lot better than a normal level 38.  Lo and behold a few weeks later I see stef right atop the isotropic leaderboard.  I can say that I was not surprised at all.

That's all my nostalgia regarding isotropic for today.  See ya guys on Goko.

[Twistedarcher]

I wonder if I'm the only one who's been waiting for Theory to finish his secret history of F.DS....

[ipofanes]

The first time I played when the game was introduced at the local library. I instantly fell in love with the concept that you could develop a deck from a level playing field without spending $$$ on collectible cards. I remember to have overvalued Remodel.

[yed]

I wonder if I'm the only one who's been waiting for Theory to finish his secret history of F.DS....

You are not.

[LibraryAdventurer]

I was introduced to Dominion in December 2012. while hanging out with some friends who I don't see often. The one who brought Dominion only had Intrigue. He said Intrigue was similar to base but more interesting (I still agree with this, but I also know now that the base cards are easier to learn the game with), so he said it was better to get Intrigue first. We were playing with 3 or 4 players (I forget which). Of course the one who had played before won. I think I mostly bought random actions cards, but the guy who was teaching us did give us a couple strategy tips. I remember reading Steward and thinking 'Why would you ever want to use this to trash two cards?' I also remember always dicarding two cards in response to torturer because we thought getting curses would be much worse.
I rarely get a chance to hang out with that group of friends and I didn't know you could play online, so it was several months before I played it again. Then I got my own copy of Intrigue and Seaside soon after (after reading descriptions of each of the expansions and decided that would be the best one to get next). I heard that you could play online from reading those reviews of the expansions on Amazon. So I searched Dominion online on Google, and the first site that came up said something like "Sorry this site has been shut down because an official online Dominion site is now up." So I followed the link and played my first online games on Goko. After reading the forums a bit, I discovered that I just missed out on the Isotropic experience.
I also never played 2-player until I started playing online. Most games for 2-4 players are much better with 3 or 4 players so I assumed it was the same for Dominion.
After becoming familiar with this site looking at the card lists, I decided to get Dark Ages for my next expansion partly because it had more cards than any other expansion. I really like Dark Ages, but I'm wondering now whether it might've been better to get Base or Prosperity before Dark Ages because the people I most often play with (my parents) were getting better at the game a lot slower than I was (because they never play online or read the forums) and Dark Ages has a lot of cards that call for more complicated strategies to use them well.

[silverspawn]

i dont remember my very first game, but i remember a game from the same evening. i LOVED market, because it... just made a coin... and.. gave you another card and the action back. just plain +1 coin without any disadvantage. it was the only card that does that. it was PURE WIN. so I bought lots and lots of markets and trashed everything else. i didn't know that there was a difference between discarding and playing actions, so i thought that if i get my deck small enough, i could chain them forever. i was disappointed as i was told that that doesn't work, but i still won with it.

[papaHav]

My first dominion game we played 4P.
I only bought the base set, explained the rules to all and opened workshop/workshop -> one of every card -> big money, everyone followed my lead LOL.
I think not a single province was bought that game.

[zporiri]

My first experience was watching a game of Dominion that had a couple of expansions and 5 players. I remember feeling like a genius when i suggest to my friend, if you buy 8 treasuries, eventually you can guarantee buying a province

[terminalCopper]

My first dominion game we played 4P.
I only bought the base set, explained the rules to all and opened workshop/workshop [...]

At least, you understood right from the beginning, that it can be useful to spend less coins than you have. This is the beginning of deeper understanding. Many bots people never get there, even after thousands of games.