Dominion - First Blogged Game

Dominion is one of my favourite games, and one my wife is willing to play with me fairly regularly.

When we play, we generally select a set of kingdom cards randomly using the randomizer cards, from among the expansions we have: Dominion (Original), Intrigue, Seaside, Prosperity, Dark Ages and Hinterlands. This gives us a huge variety of results, but I usually tweak them a bit before we play.  I want to make sure that there is a range of costs available (i.e. not just 2, 5 and 5+) and I also try to have some variety in the mechanics so that multiple strategies/combos are available.  Sometimes they end up working great, other times not so much.  We will play with platinum/colonies if the first one selected is from Prosperity, and with the alternate starting cards if the second card selected is from Dark Ages.

A couple of nights ago we played with the following set; Border Village, Duchess, Ghost Ship, Hermit, Ironworks, Mine, Native Village, Scavenger, Scout and Storeroom.  In this one we played with the Dark Ages alternate starting cards.

I was originally super excited, thinking that this would be a great set.  A couple of plus actions, a plus cards, a plus buy, and a bunch of cards that seem to naturally fit into combos (scout, native village, scavenger).  As we started to play, I just couldn't get my deck going.  I didn't hit 6 coins at all near the beginning, so all my plus actions were from the native village, and without a specific plan its ability is actually more frustrating than useful.  My wife managed to hit a couple of Border Village buys, which got her deck going pretty well.  As a result I started focusing on hermits, and managed to get a few madmen into my deck, which I was able to stack with a native village to pick up my whole deck a couple of times, each resulting in being able to buy two provinces.  That is the only thing that made me able to squeak out a win, 36 to 31 if I recall correctly.

This one was interesting enough that I might actually try playing with this identical set again sometime in the future, which would be a first for us (other than the pre-defined ones in the rulebooks).