How to Review a Dominion Game and Find the Turn You Lost

Losing a Dominion game feels like bad luck in the moment. Your opponent hit $8 three turns in a row; your Witch missed the shuffle. Sometimes it is luck. More often there is a decision behind the luck, and it is usually several turns before the game ended. Strong players find it. This lesson gives you a short routine to do the same.

Spread out both decks

At the end of a table game, before anyone puts cards away, each player spreads out their deck by type: Treasures, Actions, Victory cards, Curses. It takes a minute and shows most of the story.

Look at:

• Size. How many cards did each deck end with?
• Money. How many Silvers and Golds?
• Actions. How many terminals, how many Villages, how many cantrips?
• Green. How many Provinces and Duchies, and how many Curses?

Online, use the game summary the app lets you save. Either way, you are rebuilding the game from its result.

Six questions, in order

Ask these in order. Stop when you find a clear answer; that is probably the lesson of the game.

1. Did I read the kingdom right? Was there an attack I ignored, a trasher I skipped, or a rush I did not see? The two-minute routine is the check.

2. Was my opening sound? Did my two opening cards fit together, and did they fit the plan? Would the other common opening have been better?

3. When did I buy my first Gold, or my first key card? Compare with the winner. A two-turn gap here often grows to a Province by the end.

4. Did my terminals collide? Count terminals against Villages. If you had three terminals and no Village, the odds lesson says you lost several hands to collisions.

5. Did I green at the right time? Too early, and your deck stalled. Too late, and your opponent’s lead held. Check the Province count when you bought your first Duchy.

6. Did the last few buys follow the endgame rules? Penultimate Province, three-pile endings, the tiebreaker. Most close games are decided here, but only after the earlier questions have set the stage.

Benchmarks that help

Two numbers from this course make good yardsticks:

• Big Money’s pace. The Dominion Strategy site reports that plain Big Money averages 4 Provinces by around turn 17, and Big Money with a Smithy by around turn 14. If your deck was slower than that in a kingdom without attacks, your plan was not paying off. See the Big Money lesson.
• The opening shuffle. Your opening buys collide on turns 3 and 4 about 3 times in 10, and one of them misses turns 3 and 4 entirely about 3 times in 10. That is luck you can plan around, not a reason you lost.

Separating luck from decisions

Some losses are luck. Decide which part was which:

• A bad shuffle once is luck. Two Smithies colliding when you owned two Smithies and no Villages is a decision.
• An opponent’s lucky $8 is luck. An opponent’s $8 that came from a better-timed Gold is not.
• A missed Moat is luck. Taking six Curses because you never bought your own Witch is a decision.

Write down only the decisions. Those are the ones you can change.

Replay the kingdom

The single best review tool is the one from the expansions lesson: play the same kingdom again, and swap seats. If you lost with an engine to Big Money plus Witch, try Witch yourself. If you still lose, the kingdom may favor the other plan, or the other player read it better. Either way you learn something.

Keep a short log

A notebook or a phone note is enough. For each game, write the kingdom, your plan, the result, and the one decision you would change. After ten games, read it back. Patterns jump out: you green too early, or you never buy +Buy, or you ignore attacks. That pattern is your next practice focus.