Gardens: An Introduction and Dominion Theory

Ah, Gardens. For a long time, you were my favorite card.

At some point, I determined to not lose to this card - which is probably how I got the itch for all the alternate VP that came later. It's true, though, that mastery over it is not a simple thing. I have learned an awful lot, and I think there's still a chunk out there that I have yet to bite off. But let's dive in.

Running in head-long
The most naive strategy in "going for Gardens" is to just buy as many as possible as soon as possible. People don't stay on that for very long, because it doesn't take much to figure out that your deck gets so bad, you actually have to build more to be able to afford all the Gardens. But it's not too uncommon to see players who do only a few turns of preparation before starting their charge into Gardens, buying every card possible as soon as possible (i.e. maximally jamming coppers into their decks), and trying to get lots of Gardens and lots of cards more or less ASAP. Let's take a look at a couple of examples to demonstrate this kind of approach.

Candlestick Maker
I have recently seen it floating around that Candlestick Maker is one of the better "Gardens enablers", with the implication that a headlong strategy here could make real strides. The idea was to end the game around turn 17, by which point it was supposed to be not uncommon to have 6 point Gardens. Memories can apparently be faulty: In order to get to 6 point Gardens, you need to add 50 cards to your starting deck. Turn 17 means 17 natural buys, which means you need 33 additional buys from CSMs. Work out the example yourself, and you'll see that even if you stack your deck, you can't get that many - indeed, you max out at 55 if my memory serves right. However, having a best-case-scenario mentality isn't very useful anyway, so what I'm going to do here is look more at an average case. Examples like the following can show the power of theory-crafting in planning out many kinds of strategies, broadly.

Turns 1-2 you are buying CSM. Turns 3-4 you are getting, most likely 3 more. How did I come up with 3? Well, the maximum possible is 4, but to get that, you need a CSM turn 3 with at least $4, another one turn 4 with at least $4. And you can float a token, potentially. However your deck is only capable of producing $9, and 2 cards miss the shuffle. If either of those is a CSM, you're done. If they're both coppers, you once again can't get there. If both CSMs fall in the same turn, you're once again hung out to dry. There are a lot of fail cases, and indeed it's not crazy unlucky to only get 2 more (though it is fairly unlucky). So 3 is a reasonable guess. Then turns 5,6,7 will be a single shuffle, in which you are pretty likely to get the remaining 5 CSMs. At this point, you are likely to have played CSM about 6 times. Assuming you're using all your spare buys for coppers, this means you're looking at somewhere around a 23 card deck. That means you're looking at a 4 turn shuffle next, and 1-2 CSMs, on average, missing that shuffle, with it being more likely for more to miss if you have been luckier earlier and have more cards now. 4 natural buys plus 9 CSM buys gets you 13 more cards, taking you after turn 11 to around a 36 card deck. This gives you a 7 turn shuffle, in which 0-1 CSMs will miss, most likely. Thus, after turn 18, you're looking at 53 cards.

Here is where we need to start looking at what exactly we're buying on these turns. Surely lots of the buys are heading to coppers. But we're also obviously going to want to buy actual things, too. And especially with the coin tokens to smooth us out, we don't want to waste any of the 'real' money we are producing. If we're playing this headlong rush, that means we will be buying Gardens. If we go back to the point at which we're anticipating the CSMs running out, at the end of a shuffle on turn 7, we see a 23 card deck with 3 Estates, 10 CSMs, and 10 Coppers. The money density of this deck is 20/23 or about 4.35 per hand. We can also anticipate having 1-2 tokens left when we enter this stage. Given that, it seems very likely that we'll be able to buy Gardens on each of these 4 turns, along with our 9 coppers. We're likely to pick up another couple tokens as well. This means that at the start of the shuffle on turn 12, our money density will be 29/36, which is a hair over 4 per turn. Thus, we can still Gardens-per-turn for the next 4. Following this, though, we're dropping off a bit, so by the time we go for Estates, we won't be able to double consistently. Overall, then, we're looking at 20-21 turns to be able to empty our 3 piles. If we look back, this is most likely going to leave us just shy of hitting 60 cards (which would take 1-2 additional turns, average case).

So what we end up with is: 20-21 turns to empty piles and end the game, 8 5-point Gardens, and 11 Estates, for a total of 51 points. This equals the number of points from a player who is able to empty all the Provinces without trashing their Estates or touching Duchies. Of course, the problem is that this simply isn't good enough. I'm not sure if this is even good enough to be straight-up Big Money. Probably yes, but only barely. Of course, they are almost always going to have some improvement on straight money, so you'd better have an improvement on straight CSM/Gardens if this is what you want to do.

Workshop
Workshop plays out in some ways very similarly to CSM. Gain a bunch of them, buy out of the Gardens, empty the Estates. It's the most classic rush strategy in the game. In this case, we are even Workshopping the Workshops (which is not great if you're contested, but as I often say, you want to consider non-mirrors when picking strategy, and only consider mirrors when implementing). Of course, Workshop is also terminal, which means you are going to be a little bit slower to empty them, but also means you want to stop 'shopping 'shops a bit before you actually empty them (buying the last 1 or 2 when you have exactly $3, or if it gets late enough, gaining them later on). The terminal-ness of the Workshop is a pretty big downside in comparison, but this is more than compensated for by the increased economic upside. When I gain Gardens, Workshop made $4. Even when I gain Workshop, it made $3, and $2 for Estate is still better than the $1 from a CSM. Of course, collisions happen, and without tokens, you probably aren't going to be able to use all of your $$ efficiently, providing some waste. This means you won't see the full benefit of the $4 economic potential.

Still, the games will start out playing more or less the same. Then, because you're worried about collision, you start gaining Gardens a turn or two faster. The key point is that throughout the period you are gaining Gardens, you're also buying other cards which actually help you end the game (mostly Estates), as opposed to just picking up coppers. 7 turns before you start greening, into about 9 turns of gaining Gardens+Estate, plus an extra turn to finish off stragglers means you are going to be finishing somewhere around turn 7. Of course, you're going to have gained way fewer cards in that time-span - we're looking at barely 4 point Gardens as opposed to almost 6 - but the increase in speed is a big deal. 43 points is enough to outlast 6 Provinces, which in all honesty is still not all that special, but it's quite a lot better.


Some Fundamental Concepts
There are two main approaches you can take with this kind of head-first charge for Gardens. One is to try to rush down and end the game. This is great if you can actually end things fast enough, but most often, that's just not going to be possible (the major exception, of course, is the card Ironworks). The other is to try to score incredibly large numbers of points. This also tends to not be great most of the time (Beggar is, once again, a very large exception).

Does that mean that the card isn't good? No, not at all. Does it mean it's doomed to be merely an alternative to Duchy as a means for getting a few extra points at the end of a game? Sometimes, but not always. It can still be the star of the show. How? Well, headlong rushes can still happen sometimes with multiple enablers. More to the point, if you build just long enough to be getting 1-2 Provinces and THEN dive for the Gardens, things can turn out well. But most often there are one of two strategies with which this card can get you there:

Aggro Pile
If you haven't checked it out, I might suggest my previous blog post to familiarize yourself with what this deck is all about. But how Gardens comes in is, if you add some kind of attack, particularly a junker, to the Headlong rush mix, then suddenly you are in business. You're emptying piles slower, but only slightly slower. More importantly, you are slowing your opponent down quite a lot, and while you certainly aren't shrugging the junk off yourself, it doesn't hurt you nearly as badly. This thus gives you enough time to finish up piling out without getting horribly outscored by an opponent going after the big cards.

Engine
I know, it might seem crazy. But in all honesty, engines tend to be the ways to maximize Gardens. Engines love Gardens. After I made that determination to not lose to Gardens, the way I most often did was when I went head-long, and my opponent opened Chapel... and then went for Gardens.

The thing to understand here is that engines are better suited to gain more cards over the long term than virtually any other deck. Once you get a running engine, it's very common to be gaining 3,4,5, even more cards every turn, as you add a little bit of payload and maintain your draw apparatus. Going straight for enablers doesn't permit that, and over a time-span of almost any length (look at the CSM as an example), you really aren't going to be doing better than 2 cards per turn that way. The fundamental problem is that as your deck gets bigger, your shuffles get longer, and you see your enabling cards less often. In contrast, as engines get bigger, they continue to see every enabling card nearly every turn - so even though they have fewer overall, they see them much more often.

Because of this, Engine decks routinely end up to be nearly the size of your more 'traditional' Gardens decks, and especially with the help of wasting a bunch of extra final-turn buys, they can often actually end up largely, sometimes by quite a substantial margin. Chapel-ing away ten cards is insignificant against an extra card or three per turn across the remainder of the game.




As an example of this, I would like to point to this game. Of course, this isn't a comparison to a head-long rush - my opponent didn't go for Gardens, and indeed this would have been a clobbering regardless. But the point is that, in 13 turns, I was able to gain 8 Gardens and have them all be worth 5 points, and you don't do that by rushing them, you do it by building an engine. The reason why this is so powerful in an engine is that it gives you a lot of flexibility, because it's a massive well of points which you can 'float'. If your opponent goes straight for Gardens, you clean up by just taking down all the Provinces. If, though, they go for Provinces, then you have a massive reserve of points waiting for you in the form of Gardens, which means you don't really need to worry about losing a Province split by any margin other than 8-0.


Of course, there's a lot more to the card than this, but I hope this introduction has been helpful.

Duke

Duke is one of the most classic "alternate" victory point cards, dating all the way back to Intrigue. The complex of Duchy+Duke is also worth an enormous amount of points - potentially at least, the most possible on most of the boards upon which it appears, even more than the stack of Colonies. While there are occasionally some diverse applications for the card, the price point of $5 usually puts it out of range of rushes, and the sheer count of green cards you need for it to be effective usually disqualifies it from engines, meaning that by far its most common home is in a Slog style of deck. Let's dive in.

Duchy or Duke? Get the order right.

It doesn't take much math to figure out that, for a given number of 5-cost Victory cards, the number of points you have is maximized when Number of Duchies = Number of Dukes +3. This leads a lot of players early on to getting 3-4 Duchies and then alternating between Duchies and Dukes. This is almost always the wrong move. The reason for this is that you don't care about how many points you have right now, you care about how many points you are going to have when the game is over. And since Duchy is, on its own, a better card than Duke, you want to build up your Duchies first. If we assume we are against a Province-seeking opponent, we are looking to win the game by locking up more points than they can muster before they end it by piling out the provinces. 8 Provinces is 48 points, and to match that, we need 11 Duchy/Dukes - most optimally spaced at 7 Duchy + 4 Duke = 49 points. Thus, a rough rule of thumb is to get 7 Duchies before turning for Dukes. Not uncommonly, you'll actually go for all 8, since that is better still against an opponent that might snipe a Duchy from under you. Similarly, there are some cases where you flip for Duke a little sooner - for instance if the opponent can use Trash-for-Benefit cards to "Mill" Provinces out of the supply.

Also worth mentioning here is that, given that your opponent is playing for Provinces, you actually don't want to get Provinces of your own, even if you spike $8 for one. Just get the Duchy. It will probably be worth more points in the long run, but more importantly than that, it helps them reach their end-goal of ending the game on the Province pile much more than it advances your points lock.

Beating the Slog

There are a couple of main methods you have of trying to defeat a Duke slog.
Option one is to go over the top. A Duchy/Duke player is counting on their complex of those two cards to overpower anything else you might be doing by just being so hugely many points as to lock you out. If you can tap into a bigger wellspring, then this plan is suddenly going to look a lot less attractive to them - now they need to actually drain both piles as well as a third; you've taken inevitability away from them. Colonies are a big way to do this, nearly always invalidating the slog's plan. Jumping from $8 to $11, it turns out, is just not as big a deal as needing to go from 11 to 16 victory cards (all those extra junk cards really deteriorate the deck). While all the D/Ds would technically score more than all the Colonies, Colony player can take some Provinces or even just one duchy to flip that around. Another big way of going over the top is with VP Tokens. Golden decks score 4 points per turn in perpetuity, and with chewing provinces down a little, it can get there in a bit under 20 turns; Multi-Goons hands can easily score WAY more than any green card, and even single Goons or some Monuments, when combined with Provinces, can overcome the deficiencies of Provinces alone - though to be fair, those cards can work with Duke, too, if you can't build a deck to really capitalize on them by playing them more often. Finally, other Alt-VP cards are usually going to help a Province-seeking player against a Duke-seeking adversary. The reason for this is that the Duke player simply isn't going to have so much opportunity to buy them. If I am going for Duchy or Duke every time I hit 5, how often am I really going to be buying Gardens? While on the other hand, Gardens plus Province can, combined, go toe-to-toe with Duchies and Dukes - in short, more points just move the goal-posts, and that's not good for a player seeking to lock the opponent out on points.

The other main option is to be faster. This could mean a rush, but usually we're talking more about emptying the Provinces quickly, and the main way to do that is with a mega-turn strategy. All 8 Provinces at once is ideal, but over the course of 2-4 turns is still often going to be good enough, if you can do that reasonably quickly. Horn of Plenty is okay here, but you need very good draw for that, as you really need to empty ALL the provinces. Something like Bridges really hit the spot, though, letting you clamp down with a powerful air of finality.
"Normal" engines can get there, but they need to be pretty strong. The point here is that you need to get all the provinces, which means at some point you're going to be carrying 6 of those clunkers around in your deck. Typical engines are not built to be able to handle that. If you do want to go this route, you want to make sure you want to build "extra" before you start greening. If your engine is incredibly resilient (or if you're playing a super resilient Province-seeking Money deck, which is rare), you can even try to snipe some Duchies from your D&D opponent. It's very uncommon for this to come up, as it is going to be too much of a detriment for the engine almost always, but it does keep the D&D player "honest" - if they spend too long picking up money and neglect locking down their Duchies, you can start to give them problems.

Mirrors

A very large thing in the mirror match is winning the Duchy split. With more Duchies, you have more points already, each of your Dukes is worth more, and each of their Dukes is worth less. It's just absolutely vital. A 5-3 Duchy split means that even if Dukes go 3-5 the other way, you'll still have a 6 point lead. 6-2 and forget about it - even 1-7 on Dukes wouldn't make up the deficit. So in short, it's pretty important to not lose the split.

Having said that, you also need a plan for after the Duchies go. Sometimes, that's barreling into Dukes headlong ASAP. But usually it's a little bit more subtle. The thing is, in order to not lose the split, you probably greened pretty early, which means that when the last Duchy comes off the table, your deck is probably pretty terrible. Furthermore, being able to spike a province, or even a few provinces, is a big swing when the split was close. And if there isn't a third pile being depleted, there will almost surely be time for some provinces. Dragging out 8 estates is just really miserable (though occasionally correct). So unless there is a spammable or dropped third pile, usually the next thing to do after Duchies go is to spend a little time building - being opportunistic on price points, of course, as you generally should be when you're in the Money Density regime.

Enablers

As is generally true of slogs, we're in the money density regime, which means that treasures are just good cards. We want to hit $5 a lot here, and because we need to worry about the split, we tend to green pretty fast, which means our Money Density is pretty consistently staying below $1/card. Silvers help to bolster that a lot, and of course Golds do tremendously, though usually you aren't going to have time for lots of golds (Hoard  and Soothsayer do say hello, though). And since the deck is so bad and constantly adding green cards, Copper tends to be good, too. However, I have said this quite a bit in the past, and people tend to make too much of it. Copper tends to be a good card in these decks, but it isn't great. Against discard attacks, you usually don't want it. If you are in the mode where you're going to be looking to spike Provinces, hold off. Woodcutter variants tend to be pretty good because they let you get these coppers, but that isn't the hugest deal. Horse Traders is better, since you often have green to discard, and usually your best two cards will get you the 2 you need to make 5. Feast can help, especially if you need a third pile, though it's not stellar. Any silver-gainers tend to be quite good. Duchess, as you might expect, helps as well. Trashing attacks tend to wreck you pretty hard - trashing just one Duchy does huge damage.

Example Logs

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151211/log.0.1449869627044.txt
In this game, we've got a pretty classic match-up of slog vs engine. I have Count and Nomad Camp as enablers, he has Forager to trash down and indeed to try to contest Duchies, being able to trash them later. If he's able to do enough of this, then I will have to get a third pile empty beyond D&D, which is going to take me quite a while (either Nomad Camp or more likely Estate are the prime choices here). Indeed, he's able to get 3, which is kind of the key number here. The problem is, once he trashes all of those out, I can still overcome all the provinces with only 12 D&D - which means he needs to keep some around, but his deck can't afford that fast enough. In the end, he's probably better served by hauling towards all the provinces faster - indeed, even as was, he ends the game with 7 - though in balance, Count is a better enabler when it can straight-up gain Duchy.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151210/log.0.1449761347012.txt
Here, I focus on treasures to slog. Mandarin is a pretty nice enabler, providing a good chunk of money and control over your draw to try to hit 5-5-5-5 more often. My opponent largely follows suit, but picks up some Nobles, an Expand, and even (most egregiously) a Vagrant over a Silver. Nobles is a fine card to have, but you have to look at your alternatives - it could have been a Gold (and at some points, Duchies). Expand is also a fine card, but not great - your deck is largely full of coppers, silvers, D&D, none of which are really great Expand targets. So it's great if you can get it with your estates, but you're not hugely likely to do that reliably enough. And Vagrant is good, but even drawing 2 cards EVERY time wouldn't be much if any better than a silver, and of course the Vagrant will still miss often.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151209/log.0.1449697325049.txt
In this game, my opponent is able to get out to a lead in Silvers, which improves his longevity. I have to dive Duchy pretty fast to not lose the split, but where that leaves us is with his deck being quite a bit better than mine for the next phase. Crucially, as discussed above, he is able to get a couple Provinces, and this makes it so that me winning the Dukes doesn't really matter. Bureaucrat is a quite good card in these slogs, but it's not so huge to be able to overcoming such a big deficit. (No, I'm not sure how I could have played better, but probably I could have - the second BCrat is probably a mistake? And maybe I can look at building more, even risking losing the split??)

Theory: Anti-Engine Slogs

So we've talked about engines, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to build them, etc. The next couple of articles, I want to talk about my favorite ways to beat them. This time: by playing a slog.

One of the great strengths of engines in general is that they are going to win the long game, and they can twist things to try to make the game go long. They have inevitability. Playing a slog seeks to flip this on its head. Classically, the slog player is looking to get a matrix of victory points so large that the engine opponent won't be able to overcome it, potentially because it's over 50%, but often actually because the engine can't support having the number of green cards necessary while maintaining its draw-ability. Sometimes, though, the slog player can leverage pressure on piles to squeeze the engine player's options.

What You Need:

Generally you need some kind of VP pile that will work well for you (and less well for an engine). The best here is Duke, since that makes you need to get lots of Duchies, and it's worth a zillion points. Silk Road is also good, since you need other green cards to make it work, and engines often can't afford to get lots of those. Gardens is decent, but it's not as good as the others, since an Engine often ends up with LOTS of cards just from getting lots of components.

More importantly, what you really need is for your engine opponent to actually care about the bloat that will happen in their deck. This means you need them to not be able to get to all the points in too efficient a timespace. Things like strong trashing and megaturn ability are not your friends here. Against a megaturn, you need your own strategy to be very fast in order to get enough points before they can fire off their megaturn. Another thing to watch out for is their ability to go back over the top of you - if there's VP chips available, in most cases Vineyards or Colonies, and sometimes Fairgrounds, they will be able to have inevitability, and the onus flips back on you to be able to end it, which isn't really where you want to be.

A good point to look at is what form of +Buy is available. If it's something terminal and dead, like Woodcutter, that is going to be very favorable for the slog player, who can just get a few and not worry too much about getting other cards to support. If it's something like Market on the other hand, it's going to be a lot more helpful to the engine player - he can build pretty easily towards one or two very big turns, because he doesn't have to add tons of extra draw power and reliability to get his payload off the ground. Ultimately, this is what the engine player is trying to do - build build build and go for VP at a spurt.

Instructional Game #3: Jack, Duke, and Engines

Game Log

Setup:

There's two main plans here: Jacks into Duchy/Duke slog, or Engine into see-how-you-need-to-adjust. I want to stress that the engine player should not commit himself, in his own mind, to any kind of VP plan. That would be throwing away one of the biggest advantages of the engine: its flexibility. Ultimately, the decision of how and when to green should be a tactical one, based on the matchup and, more significantly, the game-state.

He goes for the slog plan. I go for the engine. I open Jack/Village. Jack in an engine is really quite reasonable, and it makes me think of my friend Adam Horton, who is a skilled proponent of this kind of strategy. Now, opening Village is something I rarely do (in fact, I think it has been years and several thousand games since it's happened), but there are several factors that lead me to it here, the lack of a $5 I want early is the biggest one. I am also eventually going to want LOTS of villages pretty clearly, and while Silver is a fine card for my deck, I figure I will get enough from Jack.

I am not going to talk too much about how my opponent played here - he got a stash before his second Jack, which seems pretty wrong to me, but other than that, he plays quite reasonably. He definitely did not have the best of luck down the stretch, but for the most part, his play seems quite textbook.

On my side of things, there are a few big decision points I would like to cover.
I get a Forge pretty quickly, despite having a fairly thin deck, no estates left, and Moneylender to take care of all the rest of my Coppers within the next 5 turns or so. The big reason for the Forge is that 1) it speeds me up a little in finishing to trash down, and 2) it lets me go Silver+Silver->Hunting Grounds, which is something I will want in order to keep my deck-drawing going, and potentially with Jack, in a nice draw-positive way. In general, it also gives me some control over how things are going.



I'm going to italicize the next three paragraphs, because I think they're really critical for wider strategy.


But the big decision-point I want to focus on is whether or not to contest Duchies. This is always a pretty key point. I actually think that, as it turns out, I would have won this game either way. But that isn't always the case, and so I want to look at the factors that go into it. First of all, the dangers. Contesting the green early can really choke your deck down and increase your chances to misfire. Furthermore, it can sometimes simultaneously hasten the end of the game on piles, which is generally not in favor of the engine, which is better suited for the long game. On the other hand, there are benefits as well: The Slog's game-plan often involves getting an insurmountable lead, and contesting can allow you to break up that unbeatable matrix of VP. 

In this case, stealing three duchies is enough to mean that ALL the Dukes isn't enough for the Slog player to lock it up (as is generally the case with Duchy/Duke) and there likely isn't a three pile coming until AFTER the Dukes are gone - certainly not if the Engine player is careful, as there just isn't any pile the slog player can realistically empty quickly. So the question becomes whether or not taking these three Duchies is too much trouble for it. To know that, we need to look at the other side. If we don't contest Duchies at all, they would typically need 11 5-cost VP cards to set up their matrix. In this case, though, we have the ability to grab Estates via trashing extra Hunting Grounds. So realistically, they'll need 12 of them. Whereas if we get the three Duchies, then 13 will be insufficient - they either need to empty 13 and then a third pile, or get 13 with a Province as well. So with any amount of realism, you're looking at 14-16. Basically, the question is whether this disrupts you enough to forego contesting or not. Getting 2 more 5s and an 8 or 1  more 5 and emptying a pile will cost them some amount of time. The question is, will that amount of time be more significant than the amount of time you are investing as the engine player? At the time of the game, I decided it was worth it to contest on turn 9. Looking back on things now, I think I would lean the other way. But it's definitely a close call.

And this is where a lot of the interplay comes in. The less the Engine player wants to contest, the more incentivized the Slog player is to build her deck up before turning for the green, so that she will be able to power through to her completed VP lockout more quickly. But the more the Slog player is building, the more incentivized the Engine player is to contest, since in this case, it hurts him less (since he's already built up more to be able to sustain green) AND it is more damaging to the Slog Player's VP Matrix. And all of these decisions have to be made based on the game-state as unfolding, but before the game is really clear - in my opinion, probably the most interesting part of a game.


Okay. So after the dust settled from that decision, following 11, our decks look liked this:

At this point, it's going to take him at least 7 turns to finish out the Dukes, after which he needs to empty a third pile (or at any point he can, take a Province). It's of course highly unrealistic for him to be hitting this every turn, though, so more realistically, I look to have a dozen turns or more to empty out the Provinces. Incidentally, his best bet is probably to spike a Province himself, so if he is ever hitting 6 soon, he can seriously consider taking a Gold, or possibly even a Hunting Grounds.

For my part, I ought to be able to get that Province-running task done with relative ease. The trick is to build my economy a bit whilst simultaneously keeping my deck at least as reliable in drawing as it is now. It is just barely drawing the deck now, if all falls perfect; it will fall well fairly often, but it will fail pretty often too, which means I would not actually consider it very consistent as is. So if you go through the log, you can see that I make a number of small errors from this point, mainly in not maintaining quite enough draw to be as reliable as I ought to be.

Nevertheless, a mere 6 turns later, following turn 17, the situation looks like this:

And despite having a complete dud on turn 18 (no Villages, which is less than 20% at this point, though obviously the chance to dud is a fair bit higher, as you could also find no Hunting Grounds), I was able to close things out on turn 19, for a fairly easy win: the Engine is just too strong here.