Dominion Strategy #1 The Opening Few Turns

As Dominion is one of my favorite games, I thought I might share some strategy articles with you. As this article is going to go over basic strategy, if you have played Dominion a few times, none of this information might be new or useful to you. However, if you have never played Dominion before or are a fairly new player, hopefully you can find some of this information useful to you.

Before I start going over some things that I have found useful, you might wonder why you as a reader should listen to my advice. I discovered Dominion in 2012 and played quite regularly from 2014 to 2016. I probably still average about 6 plus or minus games a month. I am guessing but have probably played about 300 games.

The first strategy is to figure out your initial turns. As long as you are not playing with certain event cards, the Baker or a few other odd ball cards, everyone starts with the same two first hands. You are going to have three copper in your first hand and four copper in your second. Or, you are going to have four Copper in your first hand and three in your second. Our group rules out a five two start or a two five start. It is crucial to figure out what your plan is going to be in the first few turns. There are a few strategies here.

The first opening strategy you could use is to figure out how you are going to get to six coins before any other player. With six coin, the obvious buy is going to be the gold. So, the question is, how to get to Gold faster then anyone else. Since a silver is worth three coin, this is a decent three buy. Now you have to figure out your four buy. This could even be another silver not using your last money point. Another good four buy would be a Kingdom card that lets you draw another card or perhaps a card that gives you one or two money. Don’t buy a Copper. This is usually bad in 99% of the situations.

A second opening strategy is to try and thin your deck as fast as possible by trashing your cards you may not want. Trashing cards are very powerful as it let you get to your more powerful cards faster as you cycle through your deck. It is generally a good idea if you can trash all your Copper and Estates before the end of the game. Yes, the copper give you one money point but if you have a silver or gold instead, that would be a much better card then your copper. Same with the estates. Duchy’s and Provinces are better then Estates which are usually not as important in final game scoring.

A final, third opening strategy is getting certain Kingdom cards that have synergy with each other. All cards are not created equal. Some cards are good, some cards are bad, and some cards work really well with others. As you play more games, you will figure out what works well with each other. As I am not going to go over any of the Kingdom cards in this article, you will find out as you play more games what works well with each other. Going over certain Kingdom cards will be in a future strategy article.

One final entry level strategy is to count Provinces and Colonies. These cards are most likely how someone wins the game. I may not care if you used your buy for a silver but I do care if you used your buy for a Province. If you want to get good at Dominion, know who has how many provinces. This includes yourself.

As for me, Dominion is such a great game with infinite combinations of cards with all the expansions. Hopefully this article was helpful for you. In the future, I would like to write a few more article about some strategy behind Dominion.