Dominion Score Tracker

How Dominion scores

Dominion is scored exactly once, at the very end: stop shuffling, gather every card you own and add up the victory points. Estates are 1, Duchies 3, Provinces 6, Curses -1, and Gardens is 1 point per 10 cards in your deck rounded down. The game ends at the end of a turn in which the Province pile runs out or any three Supply piles are empty (four piles with five or six players), and a tie goes to whoever took fewer turns.

• ⭐

  Every card you own counts, wherever it is sitting

  At game end you combine your draw pile, discard pile, hand, cards still in play and anything set aside on a mat or under another card. Nothing is excluded for being face-down or out of the deck. Cards on the Island mat and the Native Village mat are the ones groups forget most often, and they tend to be victory cards precisely because someone parked them there on purpose.

• ⭐

  Victory cards do nothing while you are playing them

  A Province is 6 points and zero economy. Every green card you buy dilutes your deck, so the hands you draw after the next shuffle are weaker. The whole tension of Dominion is picking the turn where buying points beats improving the deck: green too early and your engine stalls short of Provinces, green too late and the piles empty out from under you.

• ⭐

  Three empty piles is a real clock

  The Province pile is the obvious ending, but any three empty Supply piles does it too - and that includes Coppers, Curses and cheap Kingdom piles nobody was watching. With five or six players the threshold is four piles. If you are behind on points, deliberately emptying piles is a legitimate way to close the game early; if you are ahead, count the shortest piles before taking a turn that empties one. The tiebreak matters here as well: level on points, the player who took fewer turns wins, so a player who did not go first has the edge in a tied game.

• ⭐

  Gardens, Duke, and the cards that count other cards

  Gardens scores 1 VP for every 10 cards in your deck, rounded down, and it counts itself along with every Copper and every Curse - a 43-card deck is 4 points per Gardens. Intrigue's Duke is the same shape of card: 1 VP for every Duchy you own, which is why Duchies and Dukes get bought together. Count your whole deck once and then multiply, rather than totalling card by card; that is where the arithmetic errors creep in.

• ⭐

  Which sets you are playing changes what you count

  Base and Intrigue score entirely off cards in your deck, and the second editions of both swapped out some Kingdom cards without touching any scoring rules. Prosperity adds Platinum and Colony, with Colonies worth 10 points each and an empty Colony pile giving the game another way to end. Prosperity, Guilds, Empires and Renaissance also hand out VP tokens that live outside your deck, and Empires adds Landmarks that score things like the shape of your deck rather than cards you own - with any of those on the table, "count your deck" is not the whole total.

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