I hosted my 19th in-person Dominion tournament last weekend near Cincinnati, OH. After saying last time how I doubted I’d get more than 16 players in the near future, 17 people came out to compete! It was really nice to see a few new faces at the tournament — the game of Dominion isn’t getting any younger so it’s nice to see that interest is still out there for new players who want to try their skills in a competitive in-person setting.
The winner of this tournament was Nathan, who went undefeated; this marks his second consecutive win and fourth overall win at my tournaments! Will anyone be able to take him down? Congratulations to Nathan and also to the other players who cashed: Nick, Ben, and Jake!
I’ve been teaching my 7-year-old son how to play Dominion recently, which means I’ve been playing a lot more Dominion recently than I have in a while. Because of this, I ended up with a lot more than four designed kingdoms for this tournament, which ended up being a good thing. For the first time in 19 tournaments, we had a tie game in the bracket stage of the tournament: the only way to resolve this is to have a tiebreaker game immediately, which meant I had to draw on one of my backup designed kingdoms for that tiebreaker game.
Another piece of drama that happened was that after two rounds, my matchmaking script started behaving inappropriately. I couldn’t diagnose the issue immediately, so I had to perform the matchmaking for the last two Swiss rounds by hand. After spending some more time with the script, I figured out that the issue was that I had left some debug prints in after adding a feature to the script, which was adding a lot of time to the process. I have removed those debug prints and added a bit of pruning to the algorithm to improve its performance, and updated versions of those scripts have been pushed to the fileshare where I host them.
As always, the spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms used for the tournament can be found here and I’ll post the final standings of the tournament below:
1. Nathan
2. Nick
3. Ben
4. Jake
T5. Behram
T5. Isaac
T5. Michael
T5. Jonathan H
9. Charlotte
T10. Ariel
T10. John P
T10. Shaila
T10. Stephen
T14. Robert
T14. Ryan
16. Mark
17. Jeremy
Now, I’d like to discuss the designed kingdoms used for this kingdom, along with the extra Tiebreaker kingdom (which was designed).
Tiebreaker Kingdom: King’s Court, Stowaway, Cutthroat, Duke, Alley, Monkey, Improve, Tools, Samurai, Duplicate; Credit, Inherited (Stowaway) — The idea behind this was to have no trashing with Loots as big payload, but King’s Court finds a way to still be effective by using duration draw. Monkey and Stowaway are good enough when King’s Courted to have some very good turns, and while the deck is a bit clumsy to set up it was still good enough to be worth going for. The reason I wasn’t super enthusiastic about using this kingdom is because during playtesting I found out that it’s possible to play a King’s Court from hand and choose a Shadow card from deck to play as the target. While this makes the deck more reliable and easier to set up, it wasn’t the vision I had for this kingdom, and simply removing Alley wasn’t what I wanted to do with it. It’s possible that with more playtesting I could have found something else to do that more specifically fit the vision I had for this kingdom, but it played fine as-is so I had it as my backup kingdom and it ended up being used. A nice trick at the end of the game is to King’s Court an Improve and turn three of your King’s Courts into Provinces 🙂
Designed Kingdom 1: Advisor, Cemetery, Coven, King’s Cache, Swap, Flag Bearer, Caravan, Taskmaster, Mapmaker, Falconer; Dominate, Nearby (Swap) — I disallowed 5/2 openings on this kingdom. Dominate lurks so there is big incentive to build, but building this deck has you jumping through a few hoops to make it happen. There are a ton of synergies for building this deck at each stage that are meant to sort of compete with each other to figure out what’s best for your situation — I wanted it to feel tactical in nature where with certain draws you might favor a different way of building the deck.
Do you build a deck without villages or do you use Taskmaster? It’s possible to play lots of Falconers and even Mapmakers without using Taskmasters — if you Swap and gain a Falconer to hand, you can immediately play that Falconer by reacting to gaining itself; with lots of Swaps in the deck you can swap in and out of various “temporary” cards like Flag Bearer, Mapmaker/Cemetery, Coven, and even Advisor depending on how thin you are. If you err too far on the side of deck control you can buy two King’s Caches and quickly gain three Silvers with Falconer for a quick shot of payload.
Designed Kingdom 2: Crystal Ball, Wharf, Treasurer, Oasis, Faithful Hound, Scavenger, Trader, Snake Witch, Pirate, Forager; Plan, Way of the Turtle, Colony/Platinum — I disallowed 5/2 openings on this kingdom as well. You might look at this board and think that there is no village, so Wharf can’t be that good, right? But Crystal Ball and Way of the Turtle together will easily fulfill all of your village needs. A Plan/Oasis opening here is sort of obvious to me, and after that I think you want one or two more Oases and ALL of the Crystal Balls (probably a Pirate as your first $5 to help with that). and the deck comes together so nicely that it just feels really fun to play.
Designed Kingdom 3: Forts, Destrier, Ducat, Steward, Cabin Boy, Guide, Wishing Well, Ratcatcher, Harbinger, Mystic; Exploration, Reckless (Guide) — This kingdom came from two different ideas I had and smooshed together. Call me crazy, but I think Tent is a powerhouse here: OK more like Hill Fort and Garrison, but a Tent/Exploration opening guarantees (I think) a path where you can get two Garrisons somewhat quickly, and then focus down the Hill Forts until they’re gone, and once you have a Reckless Guide or two in the deck, you can gain lots of helpful cards to get you to the point where you’re as thin as you want to be, and drawing as much as you want to be as well. If the opponent doesn’t contest the Hill Forts immediately, it’s possible to get Destriers to be super-cheap with Ducats and Hill Fort gains and the game can get somewhat out of control, so I think the Tent opening to at least have some control over that is potentially very important.
Designed Kingdom 4: Storyteller, Barbarian, Mountain Shrine, Magnate, Horn of Plenty, Charm, Inventor, Fortune Hunter, Crypt, Courtyard; Enlightenment, Expedition — You might look at this kingdom too and think that there is no village, or maybe that you don’t need one, but Enlightenment with Storyteller gives you plenty of actions to use a Magnate or two for draw, which enables a Horn of Plenty megaturn that would maybe be theoretically possible without it, but would take so much longer. A cute interaction is that while you may not really need to thin your Coppers because they’ll eventually be cantrips anyways, if there is one in the trash then Mountain Shrine draws cards because Copper is an Action and it’s in the trash!
I’m really glad so many people made the trip to play in this tournament, I’m hopeful that we’ll have strong attendance for the foreseeable future and I can keep putting these on. The next tournament I host in Spring 2026 will be my 20th in-person tournament, while this one marked 10 years since my first one. It’s been a journey to get here, but the real reward is the friendships we made along the way! No really, the people who come to these keep doing so because of that, and I’m grateful that it doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon.