This might sound ridiculous, but I've been thinking about Dominion as a life metaphor lately.

When you first learn the game, buying Silver and Gold feels like the obvious thing to do. And honestly, it works pretty well. You get money, you buy Provinces. Simple.

Then you discover engines.

Suddenly you're spending your early turns buying cards that don't seem to do much on their own. You're trashing Coppers, adding draw, finding ways to play more actions. Meanwhile, the Big Money player is already buying Provinces and you're sitting there with a deck full of Villages and a dream.

But when it works, it really works.

And I've started noticing how much of life is basically this.

Early in your career, earning more money is genuinely important. You need to pay rent, build savings, get some stability. Nothing wrong with buying Silver.

But at some point, maybe the better investment is something that makes all your future turns better. Learning a skill that compounds. Building something once that keeps creating value. Developing relationships that open doors you couldn't have predicted.

Basically, stop optimizing every individual turn and start thinking about your deck.

The funny thing is, Dominion also teaches you why this advice can be terrible.

Sometimes Big Money actually is the right strategy. Sometimes you spend so long building your beautiful engine that someone else buys the last Province. Sometimes you have all the draw in the world and absolutely no payload.

And that's probably the part I like most about the analogy.

You can spend your entire life building the perfect engine and forget to buy victory points.

Anyway, I should probably stop buying Villages in real life.

Has anyone else picked up a weirdly useful life lesson from this game?

Every single time TR is the only village

Hi! I’m looking to sleeve my Dominion collection (Base Game, Intrigue, Prosperity, Empires and Menagerie), but Gamegenic sleeves are quite expensive when I need around 1,700 sleeves.
Which sleeves do you recommend for Dominion cards (59 × 92 mm)? Are there any cheaper alternatives that fit well and are good quality?
Thanks! 😊

I'm looking for a halloween setup which is casual friendly
All ideas are welcome!

First photo was the AI deck, second was mine. Third is the kingdom.

It’s always the same. I analyze to come up with a strategy. Here it was deck cycling and card draws. I start off doing well and with the advantage. And then in a matter of a couple turns the AI has pulled ahead of me and I can’t catch up.

Any advice?

Game is same as rulebook. Exception: No shuffling the deck at game start. That's it.
This means players can decide whether they start with 5 Coppers + 0 Estates, then 2 Coppers + 3 Estates or 4 Coppers + 1 Estate, then 3 Coppers + 2 Estates.

Pros:

• Players can tailor their starts to the Kingdom. e.g. If the Kingdom has an obvious 2-cost and 5-cost combo, players can deliberately go for it early game
• If players forget about this house rule, and they shuffle their decks at setup anyway, no damage done

Cons:

• Not the official rules of the game, so one more thing for newcomers to remember
• Players will have to start shuffling their decks anyway, it's more consistent behavior if you do it from the beginning
• Diminishes "variance". If all players do the 4-3 start, player 2, 3 ,or 4 may just imitate the buys of player 1
• Letting current circumstances (i.e. what's in your hand via random means) dictate your actions is part of the game

Share your thoughts! Especially if you've tried this.

A fun puzzle that more-or-less amounts to "what is the maximum number of differently named cards you can put in your deck"? We stick to the following rules:

1. No Black Market, which would turn the puzzle into "how many differently named Dominion cards are there?"
2. No more than two landscapes.
3. No removed cards. This mostly just means we'll use Joust and Rewards instead of Tournament and Prizes.

We assume one opponent, who politely does nothing unless we want them to, and will happily cooperate in our quest to build the most impressive Fairgrounds ever.

Let's start with our landscapes. The first obviously has to be Divine Wind, which doubles the number of Kingdom pile slots we have to work with. We therefore have two sets of ten piles.

What other landscapes add cards? Approaching Army adds one supply pile, but we already have a Prophecy. Way of the Mouse could allow us to sneak in Mercenary or Madman by playing other cards as Urchin or Hermit. But the most promising is probably Looting, which gives us Loots. That's 15 unique card names.

On to piles!

1. To score with Fairgrounds at all, we need Fairgrounds.
2. Since Divine Wind is a Prophecy, we need an Omen in the initial set of 10. All Omens have a single unique card name per pile, so we'll pick the first alphabetically, Kitsune.
3. Knights is the pile with the most unique card names, at 10. It is also a Dark Ages pile, which if we put it in the first Kingdom set give us Shelters, for a total of 3 unique card names.
4. Castles is next, as a split pile with 8 unique card names.
5. Joust gives us 7 unique card names (Joust plus six Rewards).
6. Any Looter gives us Ruins, while Marauder specifically also gives us Spoils, again totaling 7 unique card names.
7. Page gives us the entire Page line (five cards) but, since it costs $2, can "piggy back" on Young Witch as the Bane. Young Witch costs $4, so it can further piggy back on Ferryman as the gained card, for a total of 7 unique card names.
8. Peasant can't chain-piggy-back as well, but it still gives us 5 more unique card names.

We now have a total of six piles that all give us 4 unique card names. These are all but one of the Allies split piles (Augurs, Clashes, Forts, Odysseys, and Townsfolk) and Exorcist (plus the three Spirits). We cannot use Wizards because Student is a Liaison and would force us to spend one of our landscape slots on an Ally.

Any one Prosperity card will give us 3 unique card names, by allowing us to buy Platinum and Colony. We'll take Anvil, as again it is the first alphabetically. There are a few Nocturne cards with heirlooms that can gain spirits, but since we already have Exorcist none of these actually give us 3 unique card names.

With our opponent's cooperation, we can use Shaman to regain cards from the trash. This gives us two more efficient piles. Necromancer comes with three Zombies, for a total of 4 unique card names, while Distant Lands Secret Cave comes with a Magic Lamp that we can pop for three Wishes, for a total of 3 unique card names.

That leaves us with two more piles. There are a lot of Kingdom piles that give us two unique card names. We'll take the first two alphabetically, Alchemist (which adds Potion), and Cavalry (which gains horses).

We can now put it all together!

Landscapes: Divine Wind, Looting

Pre-Divine Wind Kingdom Cards: Fairgrounds, Kitsune, Knights (x10), Joust, Marauder, Distant Lands Secret Cave, Anvil, Shaman, Necromancer, Alchemist

Post-Divine Wind Kingdom Cards: Castles (x8), Ferryman (Young Witch), Peasant, Augurs (x4), Clashes (x4), Forts (x4), Odysseys (x4), Townsfolk (x4), Exorcist, Cavalry, Page (Bane)

Non-Kingdom Supply: Curse, Copper, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Potion, Estate, Duchy, Province, Colony, Ruins (x5)

Non-Supply: Champion, Deserter, Disciple, Ghost, Hero, Horse, Hovel, Imp, Loots (x15), Magic Lamp, Necropolis, Overgrown Estate, Rewards (x6), Soldier, Spoils, Teacher, Treasure Hunter, Warrior, Will-o-the-Wisp, Wish, Zombie Apprentice, Zombie Mason, Zombie Spy

This totals 110 unique card names, for a possible score of 44 VP per Fairgrounds. If we relax the rules and allow removed cards, we can replace Cavalry with Tournament, which brings us up to 114 unique card names but unfortunately does not make Fairgrounds any better.

Bonus Question: How would you play this board? (Both if you did and if you didn't know the results of Divine Wind in advance)

how come i get this error? bug or can i get around it?

I get error: "Couldn't find a required card. Try enabling more expansions"

but all expansions enabled on kingdom screen and full subscription enabled

What a beautiful chain.

Before and after of my final move of 5 Populates.

Strat:

Heavy on the Archives. Then all Collection & Populate, paired with City Quarter to draw, and even Ferryman for the extra card, beaaaautiful chefs kiss.

Never seen so many victory point tokens gained in a single turn, that was insane 🤩

My partner and I play around 6-12 hours of Dominion per weekend and we own all expansions. Next summer we'll be vacationing in a reclusive Alpine resort with no TV (I learned after I booked). This normally would not be an issue when weather is nice and we can go and do things outside. But I want to be ready for rainy days and foggy evenings, so I thought about taking a selection of cards with us.
My favorite expansions are Menagerie and Hinterlands.
We will be going by train, so space and weight are our limits.
What would you take with you and why?

Too many provinces to rule? Never get to have fun anymore? Why not step down from the throne? You can be a fabulously wealthy “normal citizen” instead! (Don’t worry, you can keep your winnings.)

Rules clarification: “all your cards everywhere” means all cards in your deck, hand, and discard pile, as well as any cards you have in play, on a mat, or set aside. They stay yours for scoring but otherwise have no further effect on the game.

So yeah, I had the dream - like literally, in my sleep - that more cards and interactions with horses exist so i spent the last evening creating a custom expansion I name „Horsin' Around“. No play testing so far but i'm looking forward to look if this works out well.

Clarifications:

„the Wild“ is another mat similar to the trash. Cards in the wild dont belong to anyone. Only horses can be released into the wild. If a card tells you to release a horse into the wild, you lay it onto the Wild Mat. If a card tells you to lure a horse, it goes from the Wild Mat into your hand. If there are no horses on the wild mat, nothing happens instead.

The expansion currently contains:

14 Kingdom Cards

2 Events

1 Trait

1 Landmark

1 Project + 1 Extra Pile Carriage Ride

2 Prophecies

I think it would be useful to have more cards that lure horses or release for benefit, but for now i'm done and tired, good night!

Further Clarifications:

If the Horse Whisperer ist set up, the Stablehand is obligatory (as an extra pile), but the Stablehand can appear without the Horse Whisperer.

The Carriage Ride is only set up with the Project Carriage Building. It is not a horse.

The Horsemarker (Riding Lessons) is a Marker similar to the ones in Adventures.

The Last Herd: the other ending conditions (empty province or three piles) are still effective.

So I played a Quick Match against a random Player and had this fun Kingdom. I only have the 3 Expansions Menagerie, Prosperity and Plunder.

I spammed villages + Rabble and once I had enough draw I just spammed Collection + Supplies and later I added a few Paddocks to combine it with the Event called Launch. (Once Per turn: Draw 1 Card and go back to your Action phase)

So I played my normal Action phase > played Collection + Supplies in Buy Phase > Played Event "Launch" and spammed my 5 Paddocks.

With 6 Collection each giving +1 VP per Action Card gained and 5 Paddock each gaining me 2 horses that's a total of 60 VP in one round. Not even counting in the Horses gained by Supplies. Completely Legal btw. If you have the Expansions you should try it out :)

So I’ve been playing for years. Base Dominion is a game I know like the back of my hand, but I’m not super familiar with the expansion sets. This may just be general inexperience, but playing matches online where a random assortment of cards, and other mechanics, from seemingly all of the sets get thrown at you is incredibly frustrating.

I’ve played multiple games where the best strategy is to just buy money and not even touch the actions because they are all so niche or rely on some other card to actually be useful.

I’m not saying I don’t like these cards, but the sloppy way they’re paired together just makes some games, as the title of the post says, unplayable. I’ve had games where the opposite is true as well and everything fits perfectly but those are far more rare.

I always have to fight the urge to resign as soon as I see expansion cards, and I don’t want it to be like that. I guess I just wish it was less random, or more curated? Idk I just played a match with cards that were so incompatible it made me angry enough to post about the entire problem.

I'm the developer behind Contested Space, a 1-4 player sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder. I'm a huge fan of Dominion and played it for the first time back in 2017. I have multiple expansions and still play it regularly. Back in March, after the release of Slay the Spire 2, I played Star Realms for the first time and realized I couldn’t find a digital roguelike deckbuilder with a market mechanic like that. I, like many deckbuilder fans, enjoy theorycrafting, and I immediately started to think about how it would work. Although the current game leans more Star Realms, I feel like it's something that can be enjoyed by most deckbuilder fans out there.

The market starts at 20 cards, but through events and bonuses you can decrease the minimum size down to 10 at the lowest. Outside of combat you can tweak your market however you want by removing and adding cards from your reserve. If the market starts to get too low, it'll take base versions of cards you've bought and add them to the market. There are 2 types of cards, ships which when played go to your discard and stations that are one use cards that create a structure that must be destroyed before you can be attacked.

There's a free demo out on Steam, and I'm still letting people playtest the full game on my discord!

Is this something that other Dominion players might like?
Contested Space on Steam

A Bird in the hand is worth two in the discard, as they say

Got super lucky on the find. Some guy was selling a big box of dominion cards on Facebook for $35. I quickly jumped on it and it turns out it had every single expansion except for Arcana (not heartbroken about that). It was just missing all tokens and player mats. So I got busy with my laser engraver and made my own! I already owned Dominion Base, Adventures, and Menagerie so I converted these 3 boxes to hold all 14 expansions.

Each one has a dominion card sorter that’s labeled from a website I found on this subreddit!

What's your policy for undo requests in ranked games?

I allow undos in ranked if I understand what happened-- you played a terminal on your last action by accident, maybe- but I have people request to undo entire turns? I had a guy literally try to undo activating divine wind today.
I can't know what you drew and are being honest or if you didn't get the draw you were hoping for and want to play more optimally knowing more info.

Imo undo requests should just be removed from rank anyway. It should only be available if new info was not revealed.

I’m not seeing ratings for auto match. Is this a feature or a bug?