An Analysis of the "Curve"

I haven't been able to play in a while, so I thought I'd take a detour from the normal game summary to provide some insight into what I refer to as the "curve", which is essentially the speed at which a player can begin to buy Provinces, if they do nothing but buy treasure (Silver first, then Gold), and are not attacked. Please note that this is an analysis of averages, and of course in a real game you may get a hand that is full of Estates/Provinces and not be able to follow the curve to a tee.


On the left-hand y-axis you have the total net value of treasure in your deck. On the x-axis you have the turn you are on. On the right-hand y-axis you have the average amount of treasure in your hand (i.e. treasure in deck/cards in deck x 5).

As you can see, beginning on turn 14, you reach an average of 8 treasure per hand, and can begin purchasing Provinces. Of course, once you purchase a Province, the average amount of treasure in your hand decreases, so you must alternate purchasing Gold and Provinces to increase the probability that you have enough treasure in your hand to purchase a Province on the next turn.

What this means that is that in any given game, if you are unable to purchase a Province every other turn beginning on turn 14, you would have been better off not buying any kingdom cards, and only having bought treasure.

At first, this may seem like you're usually ahead of the curve, but think back to games that have dragged on a bit too long and I think you'll see, as I did, that there are definitely games where you can fall behind the curve by buying cards that aren't providing enough value to your draw deck. Remember to keep up the average amount of treasure of your hand!

A Torturous Four Player Game

Had a horrible/fun game tonight with LT, RB and JN. We picked cards randomly, and removed one Alchemy card so that we wouldn't have to deal with potions.

We ended up with:

Cellar
Pearl Diver
Feast
Caravan
Thief
Cutpurse
Outpost
Torturer
Upgrade

and

Stash! This new card has been popping up recently. I believe that it's a special, one-off card printed by Rio Grande Games for players attending Dominion Tournaments, but I'm not certain about that.

Stash is a new 5 cost Treasure cards that provides 2 treasure, and has game text that says you can set it aside when you shuffle your deck, and place it anywhere within your deck after shuffling. The back of the card is even different so that you know where it is within your deck (your opponent does too though!). Apparently the rule is that Stash counts as a Kingdom card, even though it's a treasure.

With Thief, Cutpurse and Torturer the game moved very, very slow with an attack happening once each round. Each of us realized that we could use Upgrade to discard Curses from Torturer, but it was a hard combo to pull off and there was definitely a lot of hard choices made over whether to take a curse or discard two cards to Torturer.

I thought I'd stick with my normal route of card advantage, picking up Pearl Divers, Caravans and Upgrades, but I was moving miserably slow and just couldn't get anything going. I think I only had 6 treasure in hand twice the entire game. Everyone was similarly hurting and we had already run out of Pearl Divers and Feasts before any Provinces had been bought. With 2 Upgrades left, it was clear that we would not win by clearing out Provinces, and we started to fight for Duchys. JN managed to pick up 2 Provinces and we were convinced that he had won, when LT picked up the last Duchy trying to salvage 2nd place.

It turns out that RB actually managed to pick up 5 Duchys admist a bunch of Feasting and 5 treasure turns that even he had not been keeping track of, and he had also managed to Upgrade all of his Curses out of his deck. He ended up with 20 points, JN had 15, LT had 14 and I had 13 with 4 curses left in my deck.

Card advantage definitely didn't help me that game. I realized the power of Feast this game, if you have Kingdom cards that help you cycle through Victory cards (such as Cellar), Feasting for Duchys can be quite powerful. Stash is also a really fun card when you are keeping your deck lean, knowing that you can draw 2 treasure helps you set up some big turns!