When should I start collecting Victory Points in Dominion?

Question

When is a good time to start collecting victory points... is it good to wait until toward the end, or seldomly through the beginning of the game? The tradeoff too early is they can clog up your deck, but too late then you can't acquire enough victory points to win the game...

Any strategies?

Answer 1

This question is really dependent on the Kingdom cards available and no overreaching general rule can be made without a lot of major caveats.

One good strategy would be

1. Always buy a province when you can afford it
2. (Unless you don't have a gold yet, and the game is still young)
3. Start buying Duchies once one pile is empty if you think the game will end by 3 piles disappearing
4. Start buying Duchies once half the provinces are gone if you think the game will end by province depletion.
5. Start buying Estates when you think you have at most one shuffle left in the game.

Again, this is general advice and specific cards can change things up drastically!

Answer 2

It's safe to say that, unless you have a very specific strategy that can put deck clogging victory cards to use, you'll never want to buy them early in the game.

The most crucial aspect is your opponents deck.

If you are tuning your deck into something that might be able to buy a Province every turn, then you can hold off till your opponent buys the first Province (assuming their deck is not as good as yours).

If your opponent is ahead of you, or you can see that they will eventually have a deck you cannot compete with - time to get creative and start buying earlier, hopefully in ways that will allow you to acquire victory points steadily and not slow you down late (at which point your opponents deck will probably be even more powerful).