science of board games

The hot game of the moment around my gaming group and house seems to be Dominion. Now, I'm not normally much for crazy card games, but this one is simply amazing (and not so crazy).

The two-cent description is that you are trying to build a deck (from which you draw 5-card hands) that will best enable you to win, that is, have the most victory points. Unfortunately, victory point cards are a waste of space in your deck otherwise, as they are worthless during game play itself — other cards provide actions you can take and money you can spend to buy other cards.

It's a balancing game, and there are certain strategies that you learn fairly quickly. I'm still analyzing the game, but I have not had the chance to construct any computer models due to the large variety of cards and randomness in an individual hand.

One key idea most people pick up is that there is a delicate balance of cards you want. For instance, gold cards are one of the most expensive cards to buy (costing 6), and are worth 3 when spent. Copper, on the other hand, is free and only worth 1 when spent. But, gold really is worth more because it allows you to have a much higher total value in a 5-card hand, enabling you to buy better cards.

And this is where the above problem with victory point cards come in: They have no value during the game. So the more you buy, the more dud cards you have in your hand.

At first, most of us thought that this was crippling, and we often played the games in two separate phases: the "normal" game phase and the "everyone-go-crazy-buying-victory-points-phase".

However, it turns out that this is where the "cellar" card comes in handy: it allows you to discard cards in your hand for new cards from your deck. So, in theory, as long as you keep a healthy supply of cellars, then you can have a ton of victory point cards without hurting your deck too much.

After playing like this, I think it's a good strategy that allows you to purchase more victory points in the earlier game. This is especially important if "gardens" are in the variant you are playing. A garden is worth 1 victory point for every 10 cards in your deck. Often, when we've played with them, we will accumulate decks of over 100 cards. And furthermore, gardens are very cheap to purchase, changing the dynamic of the game significantly.

There are still a lot of questions I have about this game. The most important being, "What exactly breaks when you have more than 4 people (the maximum on the box)?" Since we have 6 in our normal gaming group, it's an important question, but I'd like to do some modeling to figure it out.

Happy holidays everyone.