Dominion: Dark Ages - Tips & Strategies

The Storeroom allows you to discard cards and draw more, then discard again and get money. As such, this card is incredibly powerful to enable manipulation of your hand with other types of cards, such as the Tunnel from Dominion: Hinterlands. Since Tunnel gives you a Gold whenever it is discarded from your hand, you can start grabbing golds easily. All you need is one tunnel in eight cards (if you discarded your whole hand twice), and you’d be raking in the gold.

Of course, if you didn’t have the tunnel, you could still use the Storeroom to fill your hand with money (discarding everything else) and soon buy enough Silvers or Golds to turn that combination into Provinces. You almost don’t need anything else in your hand to win, depending on what your opponent does.

One reason for keeping the ruins and knights piles face-down (except for the top card) is that many Dominion players will pick up an unfamiliar card from the supply so that they can read it and see what it does, and they could accidentally expose the next card when doing so if it were face-up.

If everyone playing knows what the 10 knight cards are or the table is arranged so that all players can read these cards easily without touching them, then I could see how face-up piles might be more convenient. But if you’re playing in a group where players might take advantage of seeing the cards underneath, keeping them face-down is a precaution for those groups to take.

The rules instruct you to shuffle the Ruins and Knight decks (when they are needed in a game) and keep them face-down. You are only supposed to turn the top card face-up. As cards are gained off of these piles, you then reveal the next face-down card immediately. If anything is supposed to get sent back to that supply, you are supposed to turn the current face-up card back to its face-down position (without looking at it) and place the newest card face-up.

Keep the cards face-up after shuffling them. The top card will keep the next card in line undisclosed until the proper time anyway. Just make sure the deck stays neat and players only pick up a card when they are sure they are going to buy it (so no info is gained either way).