Province

Province
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Victory
Kingdom card?	No
Set	Base
Illustrator(s)	Martin Hoffmann
Card text
6

Province is a basic Victory card included in all games of Dominion. In most games, it is (at ) the most expensive Victory card and (at 6 ) the one worth the greatest number of victory points, and emptying the Province supply pile ends the game. For this reason, in many games of Dominion the goal is effectively to gain more Provinces than your opponents. In games with more than four players, the number of Provinces in the initial supply is increased to three for each player in the game.

The Penultimate Province Rule is a strategy guideline regarding controlling the timing of endgame by declining to buy the penultimate Province in the supply on turns when you could afford to do so.

The presence of alt-VP cards or Colony can reduce the importance of Provinces.

Strategy

The role of Province varies enormously from game to game:

1. In many Kingdoms, Province is important because it provides the most   you can get from a single gain. For example, in a Kingdom without Colonies or alt-VP and where gaining more than one card per turn is difficult or impossible, there is effectively a maximum speed limit of 6  per turn, and the winner of the game will likely be the player who gains the most Provinces.
2. In other Kingdoms, the 6  from Province is secondary in importance to the fact that emptying the Province pile ends the game. For example, with Bridge, it may be possible to gain all (or all remaining) Provinces in a single turn, ending the game before your opponent has a chance to respond. Similarly, in Kingdoms with cards like Remodel, it may be possible to do a mix of gaining and milling Provinces to control the number left in the pile and end the game at a favorable moment.
3. In still other Kingdoms, Province may be relatively unimportant. Some Kingdoms feature Colony or alt-VP that can score more than Province. Others feature ways to empty piles so quickly that the game is likely to end before any player obtains a substantial number of  .

This wildly varying role makes describing any general strategy for Provinces difficult, but a few general pointers follow:

1. Engines are often described in terms of how many Provinces per turn they can gain, with players saying things like “with these Kingdom cards, I want to build to double Province” or “I want to build to Province + Duchy,” meaning that they intend to build a deck that can gain the listed Victory cards every turn. In general, your strategy should be to hold off on buying Provinces until after you've established a deck that can sustainably green in accordance with your plan. This is because Provinces are dead cards in your deck and will slow you down if you add them prematurely. Thus, on boards without +Buy or other ways of gaining extra  , you should typically only build up to the point at which you have a deck that will reliably gain a Province per turn before greening by buying Province. But on boards with more Buys, gains, and other options for scoring, you will often build a deck that can gain 2-3 Provinces per turn before touching the Province pile.
2. In some games where piles empty very quickly, Province becomes a card that you buy to defend against a pile-out win. For example, if you know your opponent can gain 5 cards on their next turn, and there will be 5 cards remaining across the lowest Kingdom piles at the end of your turn, you should consider buying a Province. Your opponent will not be able to gain a Province (to catch up on  ) and simultaneously gain 5 other cards, since they only have 5 total gains, so they will not win on their next turn, keeping your hope of winning alive.
3. Analogously, you should often try to ensure that there are more Provinces in the Supply than your opponent can gain on their next turn, to prevent your opponent from ending the game. In its simplest form (when players can only gain 1 Province per turn), this is known as the Penultimate Province Rule and can lead to Duchy dancing.
4. In some games with cards that interact with Province, gaining Provinces earlier than usual can be good. Cards which can mill Provinces are one example (e.g. Remodel or Rebuild); but so are cards that can Exile or otherwise stash away Provinces, such as Sanctuary or Island. Tournament and Explorer are other examples of cards that can encourage gaining an early Province.

Cards that interact with Province

Province gainers

• Dominate and Alliance

Other interactions

• Explorer is much better with a Province in hand, yielding a Gold instead of Silver
• Tournament only gains a Prize when you have a Province to discard, and only has other benefits if none of your opponents has a Province in hand
• Fool's Gold's reaction occurs when an opponent buys a Province
• Mountain Pass activates when the first Province is gained

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		6	Dominion 1st Edition	October 2008
	never implemented	6	Base Cards 1st Edition	June 2012
		6	Dominion 2nd Edition	October 2016
	never implemented	6	Base Cards 2nd Edition	June 2018

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Chinese	行省 (pron. xíng shěng)
Czech	Provincie
Dutch	Provincie			6	Eerste editie (2008)
	Provincie			6	Tweede editie (2017)
Finnish	Lääni
French	Province
German	Provinz			6	(2008)
	Provinz			6	(2019)
Greek	Επαρχία (pron. eparkhia)
Hungarian	Tartomány
Italian	Provincia
Japanese	属州 (pron. zokushū)
Korean	속주 (pron. sogju)
Norwegian	Provins
Polish	Prowincja
Romanian	Provincie
Russian	Провинция (pron. provintsiya)
Spanish	Provincia

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

As mentioned in the BGN article, we changed this from 5 VP to 6 VP during development, as part of the fix to the Duchy rush. The Duchy rush was, you buy nothing but Silver and Duchies. At the time the game ended when any Victory pile ran out. If one person went for the Duchy rush you could beat them, but if two people did, you had to join them. My friends found this strategy, but it didn't seem like a problem. It was a boring strategy, so the only reason to play it was if you thought it would win for you. It wouldn't though; it would win for someone at random, since we would all follow suit. You could make the game suck but that's it. So we never did it. Well would you believe, being able to make the game suck is not so hot. Furthermore, if you're a new player, the Duchy rush may elevate your chance of winning from zero to even. So it was in fact a problem. An anonymous playtester realized this, Valerie and Dale raised the alarm, and in the end, Province changed from 5 VP to 6 VP and the end condition changed from "any empty victory pile" (the end condition we were using at the time, but not the original one, which was "any empty pile") to the one you know. We tried ideas that Valerie or Dale came up with, but in the end happened to go with something that I suggested (which is why I didn't count this when I mentioned Thief as the only card they changed). These two changes were easily the most important changes during development.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Dominion Cards