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Dominion

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Dragon:
The previous weekend was spent in partially in the hospital, but this weekend I felt well enough to get out of the house and go play some games. After lighting off some fireworks to celebrate New Years with the kids, my friend Blain and I enjoyed a few games of Dominion. My wife and his wife get along well, and once the "Falalala Lifetime" movies started for Christmas season they decided to go watch some movies while Blain and I play Dominion. (I really thought that it would be a game that my wife would like, but she keeps getting frustrated with me trying to enforce some basic things to keep things from getting confusing, so although I'd really like to play the game with her too, maybe it's better that we don't.)

Anyway, one notable game this weekend we had quite a battle between the Stash and the Gardens. Blain had picked up several Stash cards early in the game. The Thief was in play, without the Moat, which I was using to try to pull Treasure cards out of Blain's deck, but I didn't have much success with that. He was using the Stash cards to keep the treasure in his hand rather than in his deck, which obviously worked out well. He was also cycling through his deck often enough to pick up a very threatening amount of provinces. Fortunately for me, I had a couple Workshops, and since I ended up getting very little Treasure, I spent several turns picking up the Gardens with the Workshop and buying an Estate with my 2 Copper. By the end of the game, Blain had most of the Provinces, but I had all but one of the Gardens. I had 50 cards in my deck at the end, making each Gardens card worth 5 victory points, but in my final turn of the game I chose to take a Village rather than an Estate and that cost me the game. Blain beat me by one victory point: 79 to 78!

So... the moral is, never underestimate the little Estates.  :D

Dragon:
Well... although we played Dominion quite a bit last year (not that I was ever posting about it here at that time, but it was our most played game of 2021), this year it took a while before it hit the table. The really nice thing was, that it was brought over by our old friend, Mac. It had been a while since we had seen Mac and he mentioned that he felt like a time traveler, seeing us here and there at different points of our lives, each time having our children much more grown than the last time he'd seen them.

Yesterday Mac brought over Dominion: Empires, which is an expansion of the game that I hadn't played before. My son, Isaac, also joined us at the table. Using just the Base Cards along with the Empires set, we played the Basic Empires setup. The first game took quite a while, almost 2 hours to play, due to several off-topic discussions, a late dinner, and some work-related issues. (I'm on call this week.) One of the cards used most often was The Wedding, which gave us Gold and a Victory point and occasionally some debt, which was sometimes even rolled over into the next Wedding. We joked about how many wives we were marrying and how some of us didn't have enough land to support that many wives. Although I used The Wedding a few times myself, it wasn't as much as Isaac did. He had a stack of extra Victory points from Weddings and the Farmers Market which was nearly double of what I had. In the end, Isaac and Mac had a tie score, but Mac won with the tie-breaker since he'd had less turns than Isaac.

After some delay, we decided to play another game using the same card set. This time Mac started the game. He mentioned at the end that he'd gone with a different strategy than the previous game. (He had more attacks in the first game and went all out focusing on Weddings for Gold and Provinces this time.) Once again, I didn't feel like I could get a good strategy together but our game did go much faster the second time. Isaac and I nearly tied this time, but Mac had a big lead away from us.

Of course, I really enjoy playing Dominion whether I'm winning or losing. Most of the cards in the game are enjoyable to play with, especially when it gets into the multiple-action-chain. The Empires expansion is no exception to this.

Dragon:
I finally got the Alchemy expansion for Dominion and played it against my son. We decided to try using 10 cards just from the Alchemy box rather than going with one of the Suggested Sets which combined Alchemy with cards from another box, just because we wanted to see the Alchemy cards the most. Out of the 12 cards that were available for the domain, I chose to remove the Familiar and Scrying Eye from our first game, primarily based on the fact that there were more cards that has 2 or 3 coins in the costs. Getting any synergy was slow going, but eventually we got there. Isaac picked up the first Province. At the end of the game, he was able to buy two Provinces in the final turn of the game!

There were definitely some powerful cards in the set. The potions do change up the way that treasures are considered. I was hoping to make more use of them and I think I had 3, maybe even 4 at one point in the game, but they ended up clogging my hand more than being useful since I got unlucky and often had either no potions or multiple potions when I could only spend one. Isaac made good use of the Golem and Alchemist. I tried using the Possession card when I could, and probably managed to get most of my stuff during turns I could use that, since Isaac had built up a good deck.

Dragon:
Friday night, Isaac and I played Dominion again with the Alchemy expansion. This time we used the cards from the "Forbidden Arts" set, which includes some about half of the cards in supply from the first Dominion set, along with the Bandit card which was in the second edition of the Dominion set. That confirms that I got an updated version of the Alchemy set since the 2nd edition for the base set wasn't released until after Alchemy originally came out.

Dragon:
Today, Isaac and I played Dominion again with the Alchemy set called Potion Mixers. I found that I really like the Herbalist from this set of cards, but the Transmute along with the Golem just got me flooded with more Transmute cards than I ever needed. At the end of the game, I had about as much money as Isaac did, but he had gotten the Silver and Gold earlier and managed to get almost all of the Provinces. He never even got a single potion during the game and I only had one. The Herbalist helped keep the Potion playable more than having multiple Potion cards did in previous plays, but I'm still not sure if it even seems worth picking one up. There are still many sets to try with Alchemy and I'm not giving up on it yet, but it definitely feels safer to have just a single Potion with the sets played so far.

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