I play Dominion pretty regularly with one group of friends, but only occasionally with another group. This creates a pretty big experience gap between me and the second group, and I'm afraid they might lose interest in the game if I win the vast majority of the time.
What are some successful handicapping methods you have tried? Something that still challenges me, but levels out the playing field a bit.
As an informal handicap, when I'm playing in a game like this I usually try to make myself take my 2nd strategy - instead of doing the most obvious thing on the board, I come up with something more oddball and see if I can make that work.
Another thing that's not a huge handicap but can help is letting the less experienced players choose the 10 Kingdom cards, so they can pick things that fit into their own comfortable strategies.
I use both these techniques when playing with my wife (she plays every few months while I play 3 times a week at lunch) and thought I still win a lot, she has more fun this way.
Probably the easiest form of handicap would be to subtract a certain number of VP's from your score at the end of the game. That should allow of a pretty fine grained control over you handicap and you can still play exactly the same as you would in your other group.
The aforementioned "gain a Curse on each shuffle" handicap is pretty harsh, and may not be appropriate for all card sets. It's conceptually interesting, though.
Consider letting the other players get a number of extra turns at the start. That'll let them ramp up a little before you jump in. Alternately, give each other player a special "extra turn" token that lets them take an extra turn at the end of their normal turn. (Eh, actually, I don't like that idea as much, now that I've written it...)
Tweaking with the starting deck is a handicap that scales on most Kingdom setups and, in particular, replacing Copper(s) with Silver(s). Before analyzing this, here is why some other handicaps would not work:
As follows, you need something simple. Tweaking with the starting deck is easy to apply and does not alter much the flow of the gameplay. Even so, tweaking with the starting deck is not trivial and should be done with care. Here are some common/proposed handicaps which I feel they wouldn't work in most cases.
So, it all comes down to: replace some Coppers with Silvers. This has the following advantages:
Something that's very easy to do and explain is tweaking your starting deck: instead of 7/3 start with 6/4 or maybe 7/4.
I haven't tried this so I can't say how big the handicap will be.
Another thing you can try is simply skipping your first turn. This is probably a lighter handicap.
Update:
I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier, but of course you can also start by adding one or two Curses in your deck. Or swapping Estates with Curses, to keep the deck size constant.
I will often pick a good card that I'd normally want >1 copy of and try to win without it. This is similar to @lilserf's great answer of picking your 2nd strategy, but a little less harsh. Like that answer, it's polite in that it's not at all obvious that I'm taking a handicap. Also, I can choose card(s) that are particularly annoying, either attack cards or cards that tend to make turns take a long time (e.g. King's Court).
Along the same lines as giving yourself less starting resources, you could allow the other players to start with more... either silvers instead of coppers, or maybe 2 coppers and 2 silvers.
I don't know how much open information there is in Dominion, but one thing you could try is offering helpful suggestions to the other players mid-game. If someone makes an obviously inferior play, you could point it out and suggest something else. That's what our group does, especially when one person is introducing a new game.
This is a bit wacky but it struck me just now and I was quite tickled by it... you could handicap a good player in Dominion by ADDING estates to their deck; they would technically start off with more Victory Points, but their early draws would be terrible.
The experienced players might want to compete over how many extra estates they could put in their deck and still survive, it'd take a brave player to add more than a few!
When playing a series of games we use the following house rule: Starting w/ the whoever came in first each player picks a kingdom card to remove. Whoever came in last gets to pick 2. Then the last player divvies the randomizer deck up amongst the players, with each player getting an about equal portion of the randomizer deck to pick from, but the last place player getting two portions. Each person picks their randomizers and reveals them at the same time.
Note that we keep the randomizer deck sorted approximately by cost of the cards from low to high. For example, we're playing a series of 3 player games. Al won, Bob came in second and Carl last. Al would pick a kingdom, then Bob, then Carl picks two. Those kingdoms are set aside (if we're using the Blackmarket a couple cards from each go into the Blackmarket deck)
Carl decides he wants to pick from the expensive cards, and so takes the bottom half of the deck, Bob wants to pick from the cheap cards and takes the top quarter, leaving a quarter for Al to pick from. Once everyone has picked a card to add in (Carl picking two) they reveal them. This means each game changes a little, but some of the previous stuff is still in play.
At the start of the game after seeing the available kingdom cards, allow the junior player(s) to choose a kingdom card the senior player(s) will be disallowed from gaining by any means this game.
For a harsh handicap, ban the senior player(s) from two or even more cards. This forces you into your "second strategy".
A simple way to handicap yourself a bit might be to replace your initial estates w/ curses. Obviously this won't be a good handicap always (FREX if there is an Ambassador or Chapel in play), but if Upgrade, Remodel, Salvager or the like are in play it could give a pretty decent advantage to the new players.
The easiest thing to do is to just start later. Dominion has a distinct (though slight) first player advantage. So start last, every game. (The rules even say to have the player to the left of whoever last won to go first.) If that's not enough, just do nothing your first turn, or two turns. This has the advantage of being completely legal under the rules as written and so no changes need to be made to the game at all.
When playing against poorer players, I sometimes handicap myself by not allowing myself to intentionally gain attack cards. Sometimes I also play a slightly worse strategy than I otherwise would play. But in my experience, unless it's overwhelming, just play fast and well -- get more games in, and they'll get better. And if they're really bad, sometimes just play treasure bot to make sure they're all above base-line.
If you want a more significant handicap:
Every time you have to shuffle your deck, you could gain a Curse just prior to shuffling. This would provide a more continual handicap, rather than one you can just overcome in a few turns (like a weakened starting deck).
This isn't a huge handicap, but...
Consider allowing them to always have a 5/2 split for money the first two turns, and you always have a 4/3 split the first two turns.
Since the 5-cost cards all tend to be powerful, this gives them an advantage sometime during turns 3-5.
One caveat: Don't do this during a game without 2-cost actions.
If I were to choose a handcap, I believe I would either add or replace existing cards in my starting deck with curse cards. This would be a handicap in both total victory points and in unusable cards in your deck.
Newer or less strategic players tend to favor a higher luck to skill ratio in games. So, if your play group doesn't mind a house rule, you could across the board have everyone reshuffle their deck every turn. This changes the game, for sure, but it is fair.
If you want to singly handicap yourself, you need to decide if it's going to be a one time handicap or ongoing.
One-time:
On-going:
