Big Money is a frustrating Dominion strategy, especially for beginning players. In this post we explain what it is and how you can beat it.
Big Money Strategy
The Big Money strategy is incredibly simple. You only buy ‘big money’ and Provinces.
To follow the most basic big money strategy, you do as follows. If you can buy something costing 3 to 5, you buy a Silver, if you can buy something costing 6 or 7, you buy Gold, and if you can buy something costing 8 or more you buy a Province.
There are several easy ways to upgrade this basic big money strategy. The easiest upgrade to make is to add a few copies of a card that draws multiple cards. This ensures that you get more of your treasure cards in your hand so you can buy Provinces more often.
For example, a very strong big money variant is big money + Torturer. The Torturer increases the consistency of the big money strategy by drawing cards, while also being a strong attack on your opponents.
How to beat Big Money
The most basic big money strategy is easy to beat. However, more fine tuned versions of the big money strategy actually can be hard to beat. For example, big money + Torturer is simply efficient and you can’t be messing around if you want to beat this strategy.
Moreover, in some kingdoms there may just not be a strategy available that beats an optimized big money strategy. This is one of our biggest criticisms of the Dominion base game, and it’s why we value the Prosperity expansion so highly. Prosperity makes games (potentially) longer by adding Colonies and Platinum, and this solves Dominion’s big money problem in and of itself.
Other expansions also offer ways of dealing with Big Money. They do so by introducing new mechanics and generally stronger cards than those in the base game. If you’re having trouble with the big money strategy we strongly recommend to pick up a Dominion expansion.
