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!