Dominion Cornucopia

[jack]

Last night we played dominion cornucopia and of the starting layout of kingdom cards, all were fairly useful 3- and 4- cost cards (except mine), including village (+2 actions) and several +1 action cards, and included black market (allows you to buy some kingdom cards not in the initial layout) and young witch (adds an extra kingdom card to the initial layout) and tournament (which allows you to gain one of five ridiculously powerful cards) and Fairground (victory card worth 2 for each 5 unique cards in your deck).

So for the first, and probably last time ever, I had a dominion deck with 20 unique cards. Copper, silver, gold, two curses, one estate, one duchy, three provinces, five fairgrounds. One (or two) each of: village, menagerie, fortune teller, chancellor, black market, horse traders, young witch, tournament, remodel, mine. Bag of Gold from tournament. And Festival from black market.

Which makes all the fairgrounds worth eight each, more than a province, which I never expected to pull off. If I'd had the courage of my convinctions, maybe I should have bought fairgrounds over provinces even when I eight cash to spend. Except that then, without provinces you can't win the tournament, so I would probably have been stuck on 19 unique cards. (I never had the opportunity to buy fairgrounds and a 3-cost in the same turn or I would have done so.)

Comments

[liv]

Woo, that's really awesome. Didn't the designer of Cornucopia even say that getting 8 points from a Fairground was nearly impossible? That sounds like a really cool game, and the set doing exactly what it should to generate as much fun as possible.

[jack]

Yeah. There was a lot of discussion about how it would be better if Fairground was a bit smoother (since it's normally always worth 4, because people are resentfully buying it because it's better than duchy, or 6, because there's a set where you can get to 15 uniques if you want, and it would be more fun if there weren't those plateaus) but DXV said they tried lots of alternatives and couldn't find anything.

And yes, I remember him saying 20 is really unlikely. There's normally 17 unique cards on the table, including curses, and you normally don't WANT all of them, including curses. I think you normally see whether you'll get to 15 or not and buy accordingly, but have no hope of getting more -- even if the cards are there, it's hard to actually buy that many without running out of time or ruining your deck.

But this was just the perfect layout for it, so I knew I had to try for the 8-pt Fairground, and it came off :)

xx