beat me at dominion !!!!!

[schadd_]

whatsa goin on!!

hi! i am former site chat and discussion* moderator schadd. i am also adept dominion player schadd! one time i bumped into someone on mafiauniverse who recognized my username from having written a few articles on the dominion strategy wiki, which was surreal.

i'd be interested in playing against mafiascum users and trying to see who can beat me. you'll have to take my word that the answer is 'pretty much anyone', although for sufficiently non-adept players it might take a really long time.

i'm opening myself up to being challenged!! you can ping me on discord if i'm online and theres a fairly large chance id be happy to play with you right then and there. additionally if you see that i'm logged in or like actively playing with someone on the website, i'd probably also be happy to switch gears. it is pretty simple to play online, if you have not done so i will talk u through it - you don't have to buy anything but you do have to make an account. additionally i am happy to explain unfamiliar cards / mechanics, though if you don't know the rules to the game i don't know if i'm the one to play it with for the first time. Lol

how good are you!!!

Spoiler: credentials that you might want to spare yourself from finding out

i am 55th on the leaderboard, and would approximate that i've played like 5,000 games of dominion in my lifetime. there's only a handful of people in the world who i would say can beat me most of the time, though those people can beat me

most

of the time (i get a little stressed out when i'm playing with one of the top top players lol.)

i will blindly estimate that someone "average" at the game can beat me in like, one out of every 20 games ?? like if you've played with the physical cards a bunch and know how the game works and have some grasp of the strategy and whatnot, it's somewhere around there. i guess this exercise will be a way of testing that

convince me that i can beat you anyway!!

i would say the game of dominion is overwhelmingly skill-based, though like many things i can really only guarantee that to be true in the long run. on the basis of an individual set of 10 cards (plus bonus stuff), there's a lot of ways the skill element of the game can be reduced. a player called

markus

did some data mining about each card and found that cards vary in their impact on skillㅡpeasant increases the 'skill' of the game by 10% (dont know how thats measured exactly) because it inflates the amount of necessary decisions of the game and nearly guarantees higher-concept games, whereas mountebank brings it down by a horrifying 15% by doing the opposite. you can message the bot at dombot#0234 on discord to check out some of these stats (you'd pull up my cited figures with "!stats peasant" and "!stats mountebank")

something you could theoretically do is find some of those high-skill cards and ban them (see

cardlists

on the website. Lol! i essentially do the opposite of that). more applicably, if we play like 20 games together, probably one of them will end up being a coinflippy game so long as you understand a basic requisite strategy. oftentimes, this is something like "buy silver, gold, some drawing card that costs 4 or 5, then provinces". sometimes we find some pair of cards like beggar and guildhall, or lurker and hunting grounds, that focuses the game exclusively on the interaction between those cards (it is left as an exercise to the reader what the deal is with those two pairs of cards).

additionally, i think that if you pay attention to what i'm doing, certain nuances of the strategy of the game will reveal themselves to you. you always have this point of comparison, like, what did it do that i didn't do, and how did that change its deck, etc. naively, you could just copy the cards that i buy, but i'm skeptical as to how far that could take you within a game (also i will always have challengers go first). i'm also just happy to comment on your choices in a game after we've finished. even if it's hard to learn some things on a game by game basis, maybe you'll see a little bit of beauty just watching the stuff that i do.

results:

every time a player beats me or ties with me, i will post in this thread; when you beat me you will be immortalized in this opening post. you can request for me to post in the thread whenever i beat you, however this is optional. a handful of people are surely able to do so, such as something_smart (who is in fact like very close to my skill neighborhood. Lol.), isis (who has come very close to beating me in the past) and hellbooks (who has sporadically already beaten me in the past, which are not retroactively counted for the purposes of this thread). i only plan to do this with 2-player games, and in fact i don't think i'm remotely as good at 3-or-more-player games. each game will be played with complete random selection from every card

good luck everyone !!

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*5/8/2022 edit: no idea whether i just meant to type "discord moderator" or if i meant to say discussion moderator and be lying

[schadd_]

congratulations to whom

for instantly inaugurating the list of players who have beaten me.

Spoiler:

druid held the swamp's gift, the moon's gift & the forest's gift

[schadd_]

congratulations to tris

Spoiler:

this one was interesting. i had convinced myself that i'd be able to draw more reliably than i did (in fact i dont think i really ever got a particularly strong shepherd). shepherd is tricky for me, i don't like to play with it and so i don't learn how to calibrate around it - other top players start buying estates way sooner than it occurs to me to do so. you'll note shepherd was also something i tried to do in the who game. i'm pretty much always convinced university is good, like experience + just thinking about the card indicates that even if you're not doing so much with it it's still great. but the potion and two universities must have slowed me down a lot. i envisioned getting moving reliably by using a university to gain hostelries and get a bunch of horses but i never really got a turn where that happened to great effect

there was a turn where i skipped out on playing university (i put it down with border guard and instead took a copper) to buy haunted castle, which was probably a bit of a blunder. i think of that attack as being strong almost always but i think tris got to just put an errant shepherd on top of her deck and move on, so i skipped out on two potentially valuable other cards just to do that. otherwise, i think tris got to line up shepherds pretty nicely with stuff & the castles kept her deck moving also faster than i expected

now its like a matter of who can be a challenger that steps up to bat and does not win. lol !

[schadd_]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERHEIFZF5xw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCX4d83eRDU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcJv02OjN5c

played 3 games with isis. i think i was very scattered but also i was like talkin for the whole 90 minutes so its likely that some ideas will be useful or interesting or whatever. lol ! i think the third game/kingdom was the most interesting and i think my thoughts were best collected at that time BUT its also like the longest of the videos. i put an image of the kingdom in each of the descriptionts with the full card texts

something i think i never did is talked about cards i didn't buy, like each board had a couple cards that were just not worthwhile to me & i probably didn't justify ignoring them. so like you can poke me about those if you wanna know lol

[schadd_]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIIH0NBh6CQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXlnnwHRg-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14giVJdjaQ

more isis dominion matches just dropped. The Amount Of Golds I Buy In The First Game May Shock You! The Amount Of Curses I Buy In The Second Game May Shock You! i suspect the commentary in the third game will be not so impressive but its also one where just the way i played out each turn is probably informative.

[schadd_]

WE HAVE A ISIS VICTORY

[schadd_]

WE HAVE A ISIS VICTORY

[schadd_]

WE HAVE A ISIS WIN

[schadd_]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-8ZyVzPWgo

did an epic commentary for the first game of a match i played for the epic 2021 championship thingy. then my brother like busted in the door and i didnt have somewhere i could record. anyway i won the match. so i made it to the round of uhhh 64 now in the bracket. i think my next opponent up is like one of the best players so that might be as far as i get. in any case i'll keep you all posted

[schadd_]

tomorrow at 2pm central us time ((expired on 2021-10-02 14:00:00)) i will play my next round in the epic championship. i will be playing against someone called jonts, who is a better player than me. you can tune in on dominion.games to spectate, and i'll also probably have a commentary video. maybe even like a full one.

[schadd_]

tomorrow at 2pm central us time ((expired on 2021-10-02 14:00:00)) i will play my next round in the epic championship. i will be playing against someone called jonts, who is a better player than me. you can tune in on dominion.games to spectate, and i'll also probably have a commentary video. maybe even like a full one.

i ended up winning this. here is the video.

the second game was possibly the most interesting one. it involved playing rats as though they were mice, as shown in the image from the previous post. brilliantly my opponent and i both missed what is probably the most important mechanic on the board, which is the fact that you can play bridge troll using way of the mouse & because of how it says "while this is in play" you end up getting its cost reduction bonus anyway.

[schadd_]

i will be playing my next match against a player called kazumaru0828, who i haven't encountered before i believe but is also apparently better than me. this will happen tomorrow night at 10:00pm central us (or sunday at noon JST). i understand that this person plays pretty slowly so you might be able to show up several hours after that time and still catch some of the match.

[schadd_]

lord ok i messed it up again bc i was able to consider that adapting to japanese time changes the date as well just now but i wasnt able to realize that when i was scheduling with this person. So i will be playing in 10 minutes

[schadd_]

i lost 0-4 so thats done. took us 2 and a half hours to play the 4 games......... weary emoji. didnt record anything bcos it was kind of short notice and i was eating dinner and i was like thinking about running out of steam being a possibility. i might have already been running out of steam, or at least i don't really think i got a lot out of the extra time i had spent thinking about things relative to how it usually goes. i probably made mistakes at a slightly higher rate than the match before although i think there was also just tricky kingdoms this time.

recap:

Spoiler: game 1

i think there was not a way i could have hoped to win this. the game started with me getting 5/2 (not even 2/5 where i can buy fisherman !!!) and my opponent got 3/4. this was a game where sauna and avanto are really the strongest thing and nearly the only way to draw, play extra actions and trash. so we both had in mind to try to be the first to get 3 out of the 5 saunas and avantos

i opened with a jester and nothing else, my opponent took a sauna and a silver. i thought about opening sauna + nothing (would just make me feel too distraught) or catapult + nothing, both of which i could hear an argument as being better than a jester. but i liked jester because it had an outside chance of flipping a sauna which i would thought would even put the game in my advantage. it just flipped coppers though, which is like so mild & my opponent quickly got to a point where they could just trash as many coppers as they would choose to. anyway they got 3 saunas and 3 avantos. for what it's worth i think they did a good job playing from ahead, following a principle of monitoring their opponent's deck & refusing to buy provinces as long as it could be avoided

Spoiler: game 2

really tricky and long game, though i think there was relatively little bifurcation as to what i did vs what my opponent did. i have to assume they played better - i felt that i got a little more lucky with what i got to trash with my trading post at turns 5-8 ish but then it felt like my advisors weren't working out well shortly thereafter. i think the big difference in how we played was that i got a couple golds (just as something valuable to gain with pilgrimage) and they skipped that. maybe a big mistake i made was that on my last turn i let my opponent take a pile-out to win next turn, which i could have avoided by declining to gain a golem, but i also just felt like i would have been poorly off if i didn't take the golem just with how things were going & my opponent probably wasn't assured to be able to get the win they did.

instructive as to the shittiness of golem. both of us bought villages, partially because there's just a possibility that golem hits only cards that don't give +1 action back and the village makes that less of a problematic possibility. which means that the village effect that golem has was kind of useless. and there was a handful of times for each of us that we couldn't make use of all the golems bc the last few cards of the deck were starved of actions. also hitting trading post was always spooky. so it would have been comparably good to just have a laboratory that costed 4 + potion.

Spoiler: game 3

fast one, ended in 9 turns. i prioritized getting lurkers and menageries sooner, and my opponent focused on pixies. i wanna say they were a little lucky to get the pertinent boons really fast (in particular two really early and good will o wisps + some card draw ones) and they were just able to get a large amount of lost cities really fast with way of the rat + remodel/remake, which then sort of made my menageries not really worthwhile (i drew extra coppers with them bc of kazumaru's lost cities)

Spoiler: game 4

the winning strategy ended up being pretty simple but also probably the clearest example of my opponent just playing better than me, which is maybe a sign the game was indeed starting to get away from me by this point. i got to open priest + stockpile, my opponent had to do priest + embargo. i took an early talisman, and then my opponent embargoed stockpiles which i kind of saw coming but also didn't think very hard about how that would affect my plan. i got 5 chariot races pretty quickly, while my opponent got an exploration and 2 extra priests. and they kept buying weddings, which allows you to still get the exploration bonus. so they trashed a lot and got a bunch of golds, which then made it really hard for my chariot races to win. and that was kind of it.

[schadd_]

let's look at the games isis won last august. for some reason i cant load the old games to get the detailed picture of the kingdom

Spoiler:

this one was actually pretty tricky. i judged that this wasn't a sort of game where i could hope to draw my whole deck all the time, because gear isn't good at drawing a lot of cards (but the setting-aside is great for other things), the villages are also fairly slow for that (fishing village doesn't draw you a card when you play it, which actually has a pretty strong effect) and theres just like a bunch of things that gain curses and golds. i still got a bunch of fishing villages and gears because it's good to have both of them, and i thought soothsayer would just be a good thing to play a bunch of times. it seemed like i was too slow with the soothsayers though, which makes sense because the arrangement i had wasn't very good at getting $5 early on (maybe i hit $6 ish with baron, and instead chose to buy gears & fishing villages which might have been wrong). i remember feeling like the opponent-card-draw effect of soothsayer would have ended up being nearly equal to the cursing, which isnt what you want.

it doesn't show it here but isis bought a bunch of reaps. i imagine that i might have started playing soothsayers at just the right time to keep her momentum with reap going for a long time (each reap you buy helps you buy reap again the next turn, although sometimes it takes a little bit of assistance to keep the train going). all in all it was a weird sort of game that was hard for me to evaluate ㅡ if you were to try to make, like, a cost benefit analysis of the two decks compared against each other i wouldn't know how to do that since the effect that any card has is pretty tenuous. definitely made me think a little higher of reap.

Spoiler:

bizarro game. i barely remember what we did differently - if you look at the endgame stats here, the decks we finished the game with have only a few differences. i got more bridge trolls, one more bandit camp (yes that sticks out to me), and she got more royal blacksmiths (which sounds correct. idk why i only have one. maybe i got rid of them?). oh also she has 8 provinces and i have 7 duchies.

two cards that are important to understand for this game are situated at the bottom, conveniently. orchard passively gives both players 4 victory points each time they have 3 actions of a kind (there's no bonus for 6 or higher). populate is a $10 thing you buy that just gives you one of each action card. these are good friendsㅡtheoretically if you bought 3 populates that would be worth 40 points, with all these action cards to boot. but there's also so many other moving parts, like each action card is relevant and you get all of them. i remember getting bridge trolls early on, and maybe kind of under-valuing populate because you end up with more things that need villages than villages. note that bridge troll doesn't help you to buy populate because it's not a "card". anyway very hard to make actual analysis about this game rather than just state facts about it lol.

Spoiler:

i think this game is the one where it was most clear i just did the wrong thing. specifically i was just very confident for some reason that watchtowers weren't a strong card here, which was like wrong. they were actually quite good. the thing about the "draw until you have 6 cards" effect is that it makes it hard to make use of e.g. large amounts of treasures, like you can get from wayfarer, but there was an extended period of time in advance of that where i refused to get watchtower for no reason which made me do everything considerably slower. weirdly that included trashing my starting cards, in fact it felt like that was even the deciding factor (i think). you just get to trash your cards faster if you are also drawing them faster. i also got a relic which i realized wasn't very useful when your opponent is playing watchtower (the "-1 card" effect is just kind of nullified by continually drawing until you hit a certain point). my opponent also got to stay in a state where her watchtowers were good for a long time because she could ditch provinces with ritual (usually having victory cards stuck in your hand also makes the draw-up-to-6 effect weaker)