Race and Dominion puzzles

[roed314]

Here are two puzzles (sorry, not Mystery-Hunt type puzzles) for those of you out there who like Race for the Galaxy and Dominion (one for each game).

Dominion:  What's the most money you can get in a single turn playing solitaire? 

• With the new VP chips, total score isn't that interesting anymore.  Victory points gained in a single turn might be fun

Comments

Multiple LJ breaks

[roed314]

If someone knows how to have a second break (after I reveal results but before I reveal methods), let me know. I'd rather do that than have a giant space.

[mathmike]

A few improvements to your dominion strategy:
1) Can you buy the last copper rather than the last kings court?
2) Can you put in throne room? Maybe at the expense of laboratory.
3) Surely you can add a few platinums to your deck, and maybe even some gold.
4) Ignore everything I just suggested until you find a way to put bank into the deck.

[eyefragment]

My thought on the dominion strategy:

Using counting house to scoop up coppers and build a giant hand is nice. It is probably possible to use this in conjunction with cellar for crazy card draw and with secret chamber for some added money. Think counting house to draw all of your copper, then cellar them all away to draw the rest of your deck (minus all of the copper you just drew), then counting house again to have your entire deck in your hand. At this point, buying silvers and gold to boost up the power of "bank" becomes reasonable, and you can secret chamber --> counting house 7 times to get an extra ~350 gold.

There's probably still more improvements to be made, but I do think the majority of the money will come from mass coppersmith + copper.

[eyefragment]

Having tried to execute this strategy just now (though using philosopher's stones rather than secret chambers -- secret chamber just doesn't seem worth it in retrospect), I've found that it's very unforgiving if you, say, accidentally end a turn without playing your potions. It might still be doable, but I don't want to spend more time on it.

[ultrawaffle]

Philosopher's Stones don't count cards in hand, so they're not any good unless you can play them off of Black Market, and I don't know how you can reliably draw them for your last turn. I guess you can do it with all of your non-copper deck in hand, but then they're only worth about 10 each (though I guess that's still better than any other single card you can add, besides Bank or maybe Vault/Secret Chamber). Although actually, adding Black Market to the game might open up a lot of new possibilities, since there are probably a lot of cards that it might be helpful to have just one of (e.g., in this setup, Cellar or Royal Seal).

If you're going for effective buying power rather than just the official amount of money you have, surely Bridge needs to be added in as well.

Prestige limit

[semidifferent]

That's a really interesting strategy (and outcome!) for RFTG, but I'm afraid it has a fatal flaw: the third expansion, which adds prestige, also adds a new ending condition (from the official rules [1], top of page 6):

"In addition to the ways a game can possibly end, it ends if a player has 15 or more prestige at the end of a round."

You can probably still get quite a boost in maximum score by adding the expansion, but I'm pretty sure it'll only have three digits.

[1] http://www.riograndegames.com/uploads/Game/Game_357_gameRules.pdf

Re: Prestige limit

[roed314]

Sigh. You are correct. Now it's your job to find the actual maximum.

Base and Base+exp1

[pesto17]

2 player (base): 125