We recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of DominionStrategy.com.  We could not be more thankful to our readers, who have helped build this site from a small, niche blog (with wordpress.com in the URL) into a full-fledged site featuring a flourishing forum and the best and brightest boardgamer community around.

So in honor of our one-year anniversary, and the wonderful readership that has brought us this far, we are very proud to announce:

The 2011 DominionStrategy.com Championships!

Our first annual year-end Dominion championship will be held on the Isotropic server.  It will be a single-elimination 2-player tournament bringing together the finest Dominion players in the world.  The prize for the winner will be a copy of:

To register, post in this forum topic with your Isotropic username and time zone.

Not so great at Dominion?  No worries: you can still win!  Alongside the championships, we will also run a Kingdom Design Challenge.  Anyone (regardless of whether you’re in the tournament) can submit a Kingdom set of 10 Dominion cards, and we will personally select the best seven of these for the Grand Final.  After the Grand Final, voters will determine the best of the seven Kingdoms, and that winner will also receive a copy of Dominion: Hinterlands.

Submit your Kingdoms by email or by Private Message

Good luck!

A note of thanks: Franklin Kenter, aka fp, has generously agreed to provide one of the copies of Hinterlands for the winner.  The other copy will be provided by Dominion Strategy.  If you are interested in sponsoring this tournament or any future DominionStrategy.com events, please contact us.

The Ten Official Rules

1. Registration will close in one week, on Sunday, November 27 at 11:59:59PM EST.

2. Dominion Strategy (“We”, “us”, “our”) will make every effort to accommodate all registrations.  But we reserve the right to cut off registration after a certain number if necessary, and to deregister any player suspected of registering under multiple names.  People associated with Dominion Strategy (namely, theory and rrenaud) are not permitted to enter.

3. To register, you must post in this forum topic, stating both your time zone and Isotropic username.

4. Players will be seeded into a single-elimination bracket.  Seeds will be determined by Isotropic rankings on a date of our choice.  Any player who does not appear on the Isotropic leaderboard will receive either an appropriate seed based on past Isotropic leaderboard rankings, or be unseeded.

5. Every game will be a 2-player game and must be played on Isotropic.  Each round will last for one week.  The first round begins on Monday, November 28 and ends on Sunday, December 4.

6. Each match will be first to four wins (ties do not count).  Players may, upon mutual consent, agree to play under any constraints they wish (e.g., with/without veto mode, sets limited to a particular expansion, with/without point counter).  If the players are unable to reach an agreement, they shall play with randomly selected cards (excluding any fan-made cards), no veto mode, and the official point counter.  (Although we understand the objections to point counters, we have no choice but to permit their use because we simply cannot effectively enforce otherwise.)

7. The most recent losing player should go first in the next game; Isotropic should automatically give starting position to the person who most recently lost.  If the match has already been completed, however, failure to alternate starting positions is not grounds to dispute the match result.  First player in the first game of the match is randomly determined.

8. Players are expected to arrange convenient times to play with their opponents.  In the event of a dispute, players can provide evidence of their presence on Isotropic at the agreed-upon time by linking to an Isotropic or CouncilRoom log of themselves playing a solitaire game at that time.  If neither player submits such evidence, both will forfeit.

9. Results must be posted in this forum topic with links to Isotropic or CouncilRoom logs.  We greatly encourage players to review their games and discuss the match in the topic.

10. The winner of the tournament will receive a copy of Dominion: Hinterlands.

2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

1. Starting today, we will accept Kingdom submissions.  You may submit any number of Kingdoms for consideration.  Submissions close the day before the Grand Final is scheduled.

2. Kingdom is defined as a set of 10 Dominion cards to be used in a game of the Grand Final.  If your setup includes Young Witch, please also include a Bane card.  If your setup includes Black Market, the Black Market deck will be randomly generated.  Please also specify whether Colonies and Platinum are included.  The Kingdom is under no other constraint (i.e., you may have Colonies and Platinums in the game even without any Prosperity cards, and you may have just a single Alchemy card).

3. Kingdoms may include any published Dominion card (including promotional cards).  Submissions with fan-made cards will automatically be rejected.

4. Kingdoms should be submitted by email or Private Message to theory on the DominionStrategy Forum.

5. We will select at least seven Kingdoms to be used for the Grand Final (more than seven in case the match requires more than seven games).  We will not announce the Kingdoms until the final begins.

6. After the final, voters will be able to vote for their favorite of the seven (or more) Kingdoms.  That poll will close one week from the end of the Grand Final; at that point, whoever submitted the winning Kingdom will also receive a copy of Dominion: Hinterlands.

7. You may submit Kingdoms with any intent, and the voters can select whichever Kingdom they like for any reason.  That being said, in selecting the final Kingdoms, we will look for Kingdoms that can promote future discussion.  The ideal Kingdom will encourage diverse strategies, have no clear dominant approach, and emphasizes skill over luck.