Let’s Play Dominion
By: Jim Mcaulay
Tags: Illumination, Jim Mcaulay, Humour, Card Game, Humor

To win a game of Dominion you have to be focused. There are many different options. You can’t do everything. You need to be selective and buy the right card at the right time. The following is a brief summary of the cards available for a particular game and how they work together.

Canal

You don’t want to buy canal if you intend to by buy chariot race. On the other hand if your opponent buys chariot race canal could help you get expensive cards into your hand it only counts when you play it so having it in your hand is not a problem.

Plan

There are two ways you could use plan. Put it on an expensive card that you intend to buy multiple copies of such as cultist. Or usually the better choice put it on a cheap spammable card (one that is not terminal).

In this kingdom plan and market square are a powerful combination.

Chariot race

If your intend to win the game with a three pile ending chariot race could be helpful but it is probably not enough on its own. You need cards that will help you maintain higher value cards than your opponent. If your opponent decided to try some sort of poor house strategy (not recommended) chariot race could be a good counter.

Harvest

Harvest would work well with a poor house strategy as it creates good indirect buying power however there are better alternative in this kingdom.

Remake

Remake is another card that partners well with poor house. It gets rid of coppers and turns them into poor houses. A big problem is that such a strategy requires a good source of multiple actions and the only source of multiple actions is the inn which is too expensive for this kingdom.

Patrol

There are no cursers in this kingdom. Patrol is not worth considering.

Pillage

Pillage is a powerful card. The attack can be devastating as it can discard the one card that you need to make the turn work and the spoils are a big infusion of money. However both the spoils and the card itself are a one shot deal. It is usually better to go for consistency rather than for a single big turn. A player might consider getting an early pillage to try to get a canal.

Poor house

Trashing regular money and relying on disappearing money to supplement the +4$ per turn can work in some kingdoms. This kingdom does have some cards that work well with poor house but it lacks an inexpensive source of extra actions to make it work as it should.

Duchess

In this kingdom it is not worth $2 and should probably be turned down if you do happen to buy a duchy. This is another card that could work well with poor house.

Inn

A vanilla village costs $3. Unless you are going to make very good use of the potential big turn that could result when you buy it it is not worth $5. You would need to time it carefully so that there were plenty of good actions in the discard pile when you bought it.

Market Square

In this kingdom plan and market square are a great combination get as many market squares as you can. They are not terminal. You will be able to trash cards with each purchase and create a lean and mean deck. You have chance of gaining gold. The cost will be $2.

Cultist

Cultist is a very powerful card, although ruins are not as bad as curses they are junk. Junkers are always worth buying and unlike most other junkers this one is not terminal. It can play other cultists. Buy as many as you can. This is a great pay load card. With market square and cultist you don’t need to buy anything else.