Add your own Tips, Strategies, & House Rules! Vote for tips that you think are useful.

Tips & Strategies (16)

Filter by: Order by:
Gamer Avatar
6
Spain
Old Bones
28 of 29 gamers found this helpful
“There's more to Peddler than meets the eyes...”

When you first open the box and see Peddler, you might be deceived by its crazy cost and lackluster action. Surely, a card that offers less than a Market, yet costs three coins more, cannot be worth it, right? Well, think again!
The thing is, you are looking at it the wrong way. Peddler is a card that, more often than not, you will be getting for free or almost free. With a Worker’s Village, I’ve ended up getting 4 Peddlers plus some other nice card in the same turn. But that’s just the beginning!
Now, when you got Peddler, it probably costed you 4, 2 or even 0 coins. But, in your hands, it now costs 8 again! That means it’s an ideal target for cards such as Bishop or Expand. See? You got a few cards for almost free, now you are turning them into 5 points that doesn’t clutter your deck or even a Colony 😀
Besides, Peddler helps you to end the game early, as it’s very easy to deplete its pile; and if the cards doesn’t happen to align in a nice combo, it’s still an invisible card (+1 action +1 card) that gives you plus one gold. You have to love this cute seller!

Gamer Avatar
6
Platinum Supporter
Mythic Kingdoms Backer 2020
I play blue
40 of 44 gamers found this helpful
“Opening Move: Buying a Bishop to Convert Estates to Tokens”

I like to start out my first or second hand by buying a Bishop. This lets you “convert” your Estates into victory tokens so that they don’t dilute your hand – which is especially useful when done at the beginning of the game. When you trash an Estate with a victory token, you actually get 1 token for playing the Bishop and 1 token for trashing the Estate, so you do come out ahead. The down side is that other people will be able to trash a card of their choice as well, but at least they won’t get anything for it.

Gamer Avatar
9
I play blue
Football Fan
USA
Advanced Reviewer
24 of 26 gamers found this helpful
“Talisman + Quarry = Winning Combo”

Talisman is one of the “expensive coppers” that allows you to buy one get one free. The only problem with it is that it only works on cards costing 4 or less Coin, limiting your options.

Enters Quarry, reducing the costs of all actions card by 2-coin each. With 1 Quarry and a Talisman, you can get doubles on all action cards costing 6-coin or less. With 2 Quarries and a Talisman, you can buy any Action card and get another for free, not to mention that you have already paid for 75% of it with these three cards as well.

Gamer Avatar
4
Brazil
Gamer - Level 4
24 of 28 gamers found this helpful
“Play till both Colony and Province are gone”

In order to make our games last a bit longer, we often play until both Colonies and Provinces are gone. We especially do this if we are playing with Platinum.
However, we still play with the standard rule 3 empty supply piles. This adds a unique twist in that often you can sneak in a win by ending the game early as players tend to focus on building up their deck in order to buy the more expensive cards. This has forced us to really pay attention to what everyone is doing.

Gamer Avatar
7
Marquis / Marchioness
Advanced Reviewer
Professional Advisor
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
28 of 33 gamers found this helpful
“Forge - A great chapel substitute with power after as well”

I love forge because I can use it as an effective chapel. I buy it as soon as I can and use it to dump all of my coppers and estates, and convert them to something more useful. It’s also great for turning all your early action cards that are useless mid to late game into something more valuable and removing them from your deck (such as coppersmith). You can also plan ahead with your forges and purchase cards that you can trash to turn into Province or Colony (gold + any 5-cost card is always a great option). In the late game, forge will help you terminate the game early by forging a colony into a colony and then purchasing them. The forge didn’t net you any points, but it brings the game to a close much sooner if you’re ahead.

Gamer Avatar
7
Marquis / Marchioness
Advanced Reviewer
Professional Advisor
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
31 of 38 gamers found this helpful
“Bishop your Provinces and more!”

Bishop is a great card to thin your deck, and score points while doing so!

As Jon points out, when you Bishop an Estate, you remove them from your deck and net additional points! You can also Bishop Duchy cards, and break even, which still brings you ahead because you will be thinning your deck. With Provinces, you will lose one point (you’ll get 5 points when you Bishop it), but unless if you’re in the late game, the card advantage this gives you is well worth it. Especially when it lets you play more bishops for more points!

The time to stop is when it comes to Colony cards. Colonies are worth 9 points, but only 6 when you Bishop them, and the card advantage is NOT worth the three point loss…

Gamer Avatar
7
Advanced Reviewer
It's All About Me
I'm a Real Person
I'm Completely Obsessed
30 of 37 gamers found this helpful
“Trade Routes: A lean deck and plenty of cash”

In my play groups, Trade Routes seem to be highly undervalued. But properly used, they allow your deck to scale up along with your opponents, while giving you important opportunities to streamline your deck.

The key to a Trade Route deck is making sure that you pick up an Estate and a Duchy as soon as humanly possible. Very quickly, your trade routes will be worth +2 Cash, while allowing you to dump out your Copper as often as you want. Once your Trade Routes are as good as Gold, you should be in good shape to start running the table, and your deck should be a lean, mean, Colony buying machine.

If you are playing Prospiside, you might be able to pair Trade Routes with Islands, and the ability to reasonably pair your Islands with extra victory point cards is perfect streamlining. Or, throw in some Forges to get rid of any action cards your deck has outgrown.

Note, the more action cards you throw in, the more you need some sort of Village. Make sure you pick up one or two before they’re gone!

Keeping this deck around 15 cards should let you rush the endgame for a win. Good luck!

Gamer Avatar
3
Amateur Reviewer
Strategist
Amateur Advisor
33 of 41 gamers found this helpful
“Vault gaurantees that you can buy a Grand Market”

The Grand Market is a fun and effective card with the unfortunate restriction that you must be able to afford its 6 money price tag without playing any copper at all. This can seem frustrating at first. However, if you really just want to have fun with the Grand Market, make sure Vault is in the game as well.

Vault lets you draw 2 cards and then discard any number of cards (including copper) for +1 money each. These cards are discarded NOT played. So, if you play a Vault, you will always have 6 cards in hand which you can then discard entirely to buy a Grand Market. It’s a simple way to ensure you can buy a card that can otherwise be tricky to acquire.

Gamer Avatar
5
Critic - Level 4
Advanced Reviewer
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
28 of 36 gamers found this helpful
“Vault Plus Tactician = Point Generator”

I mentioned in Seaside that you can still buy cards in the Buy phase after playing Tactician, provided you played some +coin on the table in advance. It takes a little effort to pull off, but a keen player can combine this with the power of Vault to get a great point engine rolling.

This strategy benefits most from sets that include +cards and especially +actions. If you can’t get a big handful of cards and two leftover actions, this combo will not work. But if you are able to get your hand to that point, play Vault and discard all cards in hand except Tactician and one other card. With your remaining action, play Tactician and discard the last card in hand to trigger its effect. You get to spend whatever coin you built up, including the pile from Vault, and on your next turn you get 10 cards and 2 actions to start, a great beginning to another Vault/Tactician combo.

With two copies of Tactician and two or three copies of Vault, and a few other cards to build up your hand, you can get to the point where you are able to buy a Colony and start the next turn with a hand of 10, for several turns in a row!

Gamer Avatar
3
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
I Am What I Am
24 of 32 gamers found this helpful
“Prosperity Attack Cards”

The expensive attack cards in Prosperity, like Goons and Mountebank, are very powerful. You should plan to either build a deck that incorporates them, or sidesteps them. When you hit six or 7 coins on your turn, consider buying one of the expensive attack cards instead of Gold, especially if you have very few Action cards in your deck. Remember, attack cards and reaction cards gets significantly better the more people are playing!

Gamer Avatar
6
Tactician
Professional Advisor
Tinkerer
Senior
19 of 26 gamers found this helpful
“Misleading Card: Bishop”

By the time you’re playing Prosperity, you’ve likely learned that trashing your bad cards to thin your deck can be really powerful. Since Bishop can trash cards, it might look suitable for that purpose.

The problem is, Bishop allows everyone else to trash a card, too. Spending your resources to thin your deck may be good, but spending your resources to equally thin everyone’s decks is generally not so impressive. Bishop doesn’t give you any relative advantage in deck-thinning, and therefore usually should not be bought for that purpose.

Instead, the purpose of Bishop is to generate victory point tokens. And notice that it’s better than Monument at generating points only if you’re trashing a card worth at least $2.

This dramatically changes when and how you should use it.

Gamer Avatar
2
Gamer - Level 2
24 of 34 gamers found this helpful
“Do not start new players with this expansion.”

Love this expansion but I feel for new players you should start with the base game or the base and Intrigue first. This expansion gives players a lot more money to work with. If you are going to start new players with this expansion, leave out the platinum and colony cards. New players should play without those first so they can learn good card combo strategy and that way when they do eventually play with the larger money cards it will be that much sweeter for them.

Gamer Avatar
4
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
Critic - Level 2
Gamer - Level 3
27 of 39 gamers found this helpful
“Victory conditions: All Colonies Acquired”

The rules state that the same conditions for victory apply with the addition that when the Colony stack is empty, the game ends. I prefer to play where the game ends ONLY when all the Colony cards are gone. It seems a little more appropriate since there are so many hands that generate 8+ gold.

Gamer Avatar
7
Advanced Reviewer
It's All About Me
I'm a Real Person
I'm Completely Obsessed
22 of 33 gamers found this helpful
“Prospiside!”

My favorite combination of Dominion sets is definitely Prosperity and Seaside. Seaside’s duration actions allow you to set up a huge second turn, which dovetails in nicely with Prosperity’s need for huge amounts of money. Plus, since everyone is holding onto amazing treasure cards like Royal Seal and Platinum, Pirate Ships are that much more devastating. Or, imagine Tactician into a pile of beautiful Prosperity cards. There are almost too many fun combinations to name. Try it out!

Gamer Avatar
5
Viscount / Viscountess
Novice Reviewer
Junior
BoardGaming.com Beta 1.0 Tester
13 of 31 gamers found this helpful
“Gold and Land, Leave the Actions to the Showoffs”

My fiance loves to create long involved action combos that everyone can oooh and ahhh at. Meanwhile i’m buying up all the gold and land that I can. I don’t remember the last time I lost a game 😉

Gamer Avatar
2
13 of 38 gamers found this helpful
“When to buy that first 10 victory point Colony card.”

Many times the first time you have enough money to buy the “Colony” card, you should do it. Buy a platinum instead. You’ll thank me later!

Add your own Tip, Strategy, or House Rule

You must be to add a comment.

× Visit Your Profile