Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
All about Dominion
For a while, I played an awful lot of Dominion. I think at my peak I was ~7th on isotropic, which is probably a fairly considerable accomplishment. As of today there are 7,900 players showing up on the isotropic leaderboard, and yesterday the site saw 15,000 games of Dominion played. I made my way up the leaderboard playing two-player games using completely random cardpools.
Dominion is an amazing game because of the huge variety of cardpools which you can be presented with. Because it was impossible to prepare for every possible situation, my edge against other players (and I think this is true of most of the successful players) came from having a strong ability to quickly parse which cards were relevant and which were not. Some of this came from understanding of specific cards - if there is Ambassador you should start double Ambassador and at that point the game is already basically over, for example. Some of it comes from a more general understanding of the game, though, and that's what I want to try to impart with this post.
I won't bother going over any basic rules or concepts, I'm just going to throw the pedal to the metal and hit you in the face with game theory.
At high levels, a game of Dominion is usually over before the first player's turn one buy. There are occasional tactical situations which can come up later in the game, but it is not overwhelmingly difficult to advance to a level where you are hitting all of these near-perfectly. Your turn one and turn two buys are often much harder to determine correctly, and much more impactful on the game, than the correct order of your 15-action card string on turn seven.
On turn one you have to decide whether you play low or high. A low strategy seeks to end the game as quickly as possible. The most rudimentary example is Smithy + Gold. You simply start with Smithy + Silver, then look to add another two copies of Smithy while upgrading the treasure in your deck, buying Provinces whenever you hit $8 on a turn.
Once you have worked out the lowest strategy, whatever it might be, you need to work out if the highest strategy beats it. The highest strategy seeks to delay the end of the game as much as possible, and gives up chances to buy victory points early to create an overwhelming deck infrastructure and quickly overtake a low opponent in the game's closing turns. Games in which the low and high strategy are approximately equal and players choose contrasting options can be the most exciting games of Dominion.
The high strategy is generally harder to identify than the low, but there are some obvious starting points. The high strategy wants to be able to draw its entire deck every turn, is there a way to do that? It wants to be able to close a large VP gap in the final turns, so it wants to see alternate VP cards like Nobles, Goons, Monuments, and Gardens in the card pool. It wants its opponent to struggle to end the game on his own, so it absolutely does not want to see a card like Remodel.
The most common mistake I think people trying to understand low and high strategies make is assuming that if the low strategy buys four Provinces it wins. This can be the case, but very very often there are ways to avoid it as the high strategy. In fact, if the low strategy plans to win by having Provinces run out you may want to just not buy a single Province yourself, which will give you an extra five or six turns to load up on alternate VPs and catch up. One of the largest advantages of the high strategy is that it is generally very easy for it to end the game the second that it is ahead, while the low strategy, often stuck with one buy per turn, is stuck trying to buy all the Provinces.
Here's the beautiful trick to Dominion. When you sit down to play a game you look at the low strategy and the high strategy, work out which beats which, and then play the one that wins. The game is actually, almost always, that simple. Midrange strategies tend to lose both to the low strategies and to the high ones. The basic skill and key to success is learning to first identify the two possible gameplans, and then correctly evaluate which wins.
Dominion is an amazing game because of the huge variety of cardpools which you can be presented with. Because it was impossible to prepare for every possible situation, my edge against other players (and I think this is true of most of the successful players) came from having a strong ability to quickly parse which cards were relevant and which were not. Some of this came from understanding of specific cards - if there is Ambassador you should start double Ambassador and at that point the game is already basically over, for example. Some of it comes from a more general understanding of the game, though, and that's what I want to try to impart with this post.
I won't bother going over any basic rules or concepts, I'm just going to throw the pedal to the metal and hit you in the face with game theory.
At high levels, a game of Dominion is usually over before the first player's turn one buy. There are occasional tactical situations which can come up later in the game, but it is not overwhelmingly difficult to advance to a level where you are hitting all of these near-perfectly. Your turn one and turn two buys are often much harder to determine correctly, and much more impactful on the game, than the correct order of your 15-action card string on turn seven.
On turn one you have to decide whether you play low or high. A low strategy seeks to end the game as quickly as possible. The most rudimentary example is Smithy + Gold. You simply start with Smithy + Silver, then look to add another two copies of Smithy while upgrading the treasure in your deck, buying Provinces whenever you hit $8 on a turn.
Once you have worked out the lowest strategy, whatever it might be, you need to work out if the highest strategy beats it. The highest strategy seeks to delay the end of the game as much as possible, and gives up chances to buy victory points early to create an overwhelming deck infrastructure and quickly overtake a low opponent in the game's closing turns. Games in which the low and high strategy are approximately equal and players choose contrasting options can be the most exciting games of Dominion.
The high strategy is generally harder to identify than the low, but there are some obvious starting points. The high strategy wants to be able to draw its entire deck every turn, is there a way to do that? It wants to be able to close a large VP gap in the final turns, so it wants to see alternate VP cards like Nobles, Goons, Monuments, and Gardens in the card pool. It wants its opponent to struggle to end the game on his own, so it absolutely does not want to see a card like Remodel.
The most common mistake I think people trying to understand low and high strategies make is assuming that if the low strategy buys four Provinces it wins. This can be the case, but very very often there are ways to avoid it as the high strategy. In fact, if the low strategy plans to win by having Provinces run out you may want to just not buy a single Province yourself, which will give you an extra five or six turns to load up on alternate VPs and catch up. One of the largest advantages of the high strategy is that it is generally very easy for it to end the game the second that it is ahead, while the low strategy, often stuck with one buy per turn, is stuck trying to buy all the Provinces.
Here's the beautiful trick to Dominion. When you sit down to play a game you look at the low strategy and the high strategy, work out which beats which, and then play the one that wins. The game is actually, almost always, that simple. Midrange strategies tend to lose both to the low strategies and to the high ones. The basic skill and key to success is learning to first identify the two possible gameplans, and then correctly evaluate which wins.
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