On Saturday, October 20, 2024 I held my 17th Dominion tournament with physical cards near Cincinnati, OH. There were ten players, which is a bit lower than normal but quite a few of the regulars couldn’t make it this time. The competition was fierce but for the first time, the Cincinnati tournaments have a back-to-back winner; congrats again to Behram for taking first place in his second tournament in a row! The other players who cashed were John and Nathan, pictured here.
As always, here’s the link to the spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms for this tournament, including the ones that weren’t used. Due to health issues I wasn’t able to put in the effort I normally would into playtesting designed kingdoms, so the kingdoms for the finals don’t have the same “devious” nature or don’t strive to promote a certain strategy through my normal balancing approach. I still think they were interesting, and the kingdoms overall in this tournament still had that “thinky” or “crunchy” feel like normal, though.
Here are the overall standings for the tournament:
1. Behram 2. John P 3. Nathan 4. MichaelT5. CharlotteT5. StephenT5. RobertT8. NickT9. Jonathan H10. Isaac
I’d like to discuss a couple of the more interesting kingdoms here, but I want to include one of the randomly generated boards instead of just talking about the finals kingdoms.
Finals Table 2: Treasury, Trader, Artisan, Fishing Village, Outpost, Longship, Mine, Procession, Siren, Church; Pious (Procession), Way of the Squirrel: The errata to Procession hits hard here, as it no longer works on duration cards, which make up half of the board here. It certainly makes Procession worse than it would be without the errata, but I still think it’s very good here. All of the draw here is at the start of your turn (or the end of the previous turn), which makes Outpost extremely good, but it makes gain-and-play with Procession a lot more difficult — gaining to hand with Artisan is the way to go here for sure, as Treasury after Procession gains just doesn’t seem as strong. When building, the focus is just on having as much deck control as possible so you can reliably get a Province on your main turn and your Outpost turn, but if you get ahead of the opponent on junking and thinning you can even add in lots of Duchy gains with Artisan on top of it.
Table 1: Cavalry, Feodum, Warehouse, Fortress, Cargo Ship, Forager, Upgrade, Mining Road, Necromancer, Vineyard; Orchard, Mountain Pass: This one was played four times and each time the landscape of the game was very different, but not because of the landscapes. Oh I crack myself up. The draw here is pretty limited, with only Cavalry/Horse as sustainable draw, and Zombie Apprentice which can only be used once per turn. But sometimes it isn’t limited, because someone trashes a Horse for some reason. The contents of the trash in this game ended up determining so much about what can be done in terms of draw. Mining Road was pretty important here as it allows for a quick pivot into Vineyards, and the Necromancer and Cavalry piles both ran low in every game, but some games were draw-light while others had plenty of Horses in the trash. Even Mountain Pass ended up being interesting, as in one game the Provinces hadn’t been touched when piles were low, and on the last turn of the game when Vineyards were emptied, Mountain Pass was a liability because the opponent could name 40 debt first and guarantee themselves 8VP. There were just a lot of unique situations in this game and even though many of the games on this board went up to time, I wanted to keep it in because it was so cool.
Table 2: Mill, Mint, Merchant Camp, Lighthouse, Royal Blacksmith, Treasure Map, Scavenger, Town, Recruiter, Hunter; Tireless (Scavenger), Baths: So there’s a perfectly reasonable deck you can build here with draw, trashing, +Buy, almost everything you could want except for an attack. But you can also build a sort of golden deck with Merchant Camp and Tireless Scavengers. It’s slightly more complicated than just shoving three Scavengers in the deck because they end up on top of your deck at the end of the turn, so you do need to add more actual cards to your deck before you can Province every turn, but you can consistently Province starting as early as turn 9, which puts a very aggressive clock on any other strategy you might want to attempt. Only one player attempted to build this deck, but couldn’t get it consistent enough to win.
That’s about all I have to write about this tournament. I’m looking forward to hosting more of these every six months!