Our group has determined that buying (almost exclusively) money and points is the way to go.
Most kingdom cards are ignored, or are bought very sparingly. This has lead to games feeling 'samey' and has taken a lot of the fun out for us.
What strategies should we use to counter "Big Money"? Or are house rules needed here?
There comes a time in every Dominion group's life where they figure out that Big Money (the strategy you describe) is beating everyone else who is going heavy on action cards. Do not fret - it's most often not actually the best strategy. For example, if everyone else is going Big Money, buying a single Smithy will win a 4-player match about 60% of the time and a 2-player match about 80% of the time (via a trial run of 5000 matches on my simulator program).
There is pretty much always a superior strategy to Big Money on the table; you just have to find it. A common mistake is to spend turns buying too many Kingdom cards to have giant crazy combos that don't pan out. Another thing to watch out for is going for a longer game with a fantastically combo-heavy deck, but then by the time your deck is all situated someone else has bought all the Provinces. Even still, combo decks do sometimes work - I have been in some thrilling Village+Bridge decks that beat the pants off Big Money.
I haven't been playing around enough with it to know for sure, but it seems that the new expansion Prosperity also lends itself toward Kingdom card strategies winning more often. The reason I feel this way is because Prosperity seems to stretch out the game a big longer such that bigger decks with lots of cool combos can succeed quite well.
Generally I like to measure my strategies against Big Money - if it can't reliably beat Big Money, it's not a good strategy.
But even still: when in serious doubt, buy a Silver.
Attack Cards, Attack cards, Attack cards.
Some of the more useful ones against big money are:
Less useful, but still might work:
Expansion key used above:
(B) - Base
(I) - Intrigue
(S) - Seaside
(A) - Alchemy
(P) - Prosperity
(C) - Cornucopia
(H) - Hinterlands
I don't think you need house rules yet. I suspect that y'all are trying to use too many kindgom cards. You definitely want to limit the number of kindgom cards in any deck. The number of terminal actions needs to be pretty low to have a functional deck. (A terminal action is one which does not give +Actions).
To counter a money deck, specifically using the base set, I would consider using these cards if available, along with the number I would use.
In short - Attacks are always good if nobody else is using them. Just concentrate on a couple kindgom cards and use them to speed up your deck by trashing copper or by making sure you get more cards/actions than you spend using them.
I'm a little surprised that strategy is having so much success. But rather than come up with rule variants, why not simply take advantage of the game's design and choose kingdom cards which hurt that strategy? Try drafting instead of pure randomization. The next time you play try using the Thief, Pirate Ship or Saboteur. If your opponents continue to use the same strategy against those cards, I can almost guarantee you'll win.
I'd willingly wager that there is not a single kingdom set where big money is the best strategy.
If your group has played dominion more than 10 times together, you should have very little trouble accomplishing this. If you ever find a situation where you think you can't beat BM, post the kingdom set here and we'll gladly attack it for you.
If you want to really test the strength of big money, you can add another 'fake' player: one that is not played by one human being, but played by all the players according to the rules of what to buy with different $$ levels for the BM strategy. This helps you figure out if you're group is beating BM without having any player have to actually use that strategy.
My group often plays against basic decks like this, sometimes adding a little spice, like having the fake big money player also buy 1 chapel, smithy, or mine. You can even play dominion solo this way, and its a great way to test your own strategy and learn how big money works. This turns Dominion into more than just a 'beat your opponent' game, but a 'let's see if we can beat the default strategies.'
I taught myself how to beat Treasure Bot (our name for this effect, to distinguish from the wait-for-platinum strategy Prosperity introduces) by having simple rules which -- while not on their own necessarily better than treasure bot, were useful for developing the "feel" of a good deck.
(The zeroth rule: if you see a way to buy a province, do so. This is called the Goose Rule, and being able to get a province is called "having the Goose".)
The first rule: on the first two turns, you're likely to get a 3/4 split. unless your 4 is going to supply you with money, or either card will trash your junk, your 3 really should be silver. (And likely anyway; remember that a silver / chapel start is really good, even though they're both cheap.)
The second rule: if you had a terminal action (an action that doesn't give you +Actions) in hand that you did not play because you were out of actions, do not buy a terminal.
The third rule: if you had unused actions, do not buy a Village. Usually, don't buy anything that gives +multiple actions -- the other benefits are not as good as what you ought to be able to get elsewhere. (Having a bunch of action splitters and no terminals is called the Wolf Trap.)
The fourth rule: is the card you're thinking of buying better than three of the cards in your opening hand? In other words, were there three cards in your hand that, had you had this card instead, the turn would have been better?
The fifth rule: When 5 of the provinces are gone, start buying duchies at every opportunity. When 9 are gone, buy all the green you can.
The sixth rule: don't buy more than one of any given cost 2 card, 2 of any given cost 3, or 3 of any given cost 4 until you find yourself wishing you had it in a hand you didn't.
As you play, you'll learn when to ignore these rules or make exceptions; the fifth rule might get some caveats about whether or not you're winning, or if you're about to reshuffle, for instance. I don't follow these rules any more, because they have taught me what I needed to know.
A big part of better-than-treasure-bot play is designing your strategy. Look at the cards available. Figure out what combinations are possible, and what work at cross-purposes. Some cards help you make your deck smaller (by getting rid of bad cards via trashing, e.g. chapel, or handing off, e.g. ambassador.) Some cards help you improve the cards you have (by trashing and replacing, e.g. upgrade or remodel). Some cards help you get past cards you don't want in hand (by drawing and discarding them, e.g. warehouse or oasis). These are all valid tactics, but they mostly work at odds -- if you trash your useless stuff, you won't have much to improve or get past; usually, pick one of these and go with it. Similarly, some decks work by always being pretty good; others work by sometimes being terrible and sometimes being great. think about how the cards work together, or don't. In general, if you wouldn't want both cards in hand together, don't buy one of them. And if your strategy relies on getting both cards together, think about whether it's really the right strategy, or work extra hard to make it happen. (Consider that getting two treasure maps together is rare enough that it's worth 4 gold on top of your deck and isn't over-powered. BTW, if you're going to try to make treasure maps work, you need a lot of trashing and/or 3 or more maps.)
There's an excellent article on the Dominion Strategy Blog about trying to find an optimal strategy for the "First Game" set-up in the Dominion base set. It's a must-read for anyone frustrated by Big Money in Dominion because it shows that Big Money is good, but that you can fairly easily do much better. And then, with some tweaking, you can beat that. And with a little more work, improve it even more. The article shows that depth of the game.
Money-heavy play is indeed strong in the base set. You're simply better off buying a Silver or Gold most of the time.
Fortunately, the expansions make action cards and combos much stronger. Unfortunately, the expansions cost money. ;)
Buying only money and victory cards should be considered the baseline to victory. A few terminals such as chapel or smithy will speed that process up.Attack cards will make this harder for others to do while giving you some benefit. It would also help if you told us which sets you were playing with.
I have been reading quite a bit about how to counter the BM strategy but so far the most popular answer was to use BM with another singleton card like smithy or library. While I am absolutely confident that this is true, something about it still rubs me the wrong way. If the only way to defeat a single strategy is to use a slight variant of it, then isn't the game still off balance?
I guess what I am trying to articulate is that more often than not, the more conservative a strategy is, the better. I was hoping for Dominion to offer a much wider range of strategic avenues. If BM+1Smithy is going to pick up the win by turn 14, then my question is this; is there another strategy that is as effective and reliable as this one? Is Dominion a more strategically dry game than I had anticipated?
'Big Money' as a sure fire way to win is the major flaw that has resulted in my gaming group giving up on Dominion. The problem being that luck in the early game combined with the knowledge that money -> victory points is the way to win is almost a unbeatable strategy.
So the answer to your question is to either experiment with expansions and/or house rules to change the way you play or find a different game. I have found the the best way to engage my board gaming group is more social orientated games where luck and optimized strategy take a back seat to deception and diplomacy.
