Optimizing Buying Strategies in Dominion

Dominion is a deck-building card game that simulates competing lords growing their kingdoms. Here we wish to optimize a strategy called Big Money by modeling the game as a Markov chain and utilizing the associated transition matrices to simulate the game. We provide additional analysis of a variation on this strategy known as Big Money Terminal Draw. Our results show that player\u27s should prioritize buying provinces over improving their deck. Furthermore, we derive heuristics to guide a player\u27s decision making for a Big Money Terminal Draw Deck. In particular, we show that buying a second Smithy is always more optimal than a Silver after turn six, and a gold after turn eight