Identifying dominant strategies

A dominant strategy is a line of play that is simply better than the alternatives, so that a player who knows it has no reason to ever do anything else. Once discovered, it collapses the game: every "decision" becomes fake, because one option always wins. The insidious part is that a game with a dominant strategy often playtests well early on, while nobody has found it yet. It surfaces later, usually when one repeat tester starts winning every single game the same way.

The early warning signs are behavioral. Watch for testers who stop deliberating, because they already know what they are going to do every turn. Watch for options nobody ever picks, since an ignored option usually means a nearby option is strictly better. Track wins by strategy, not just by player: if "rush the market" has won eight of the last ten games across different players, the strategy is the winner, not the people. Repeat testers are your best detection tool here, which is one reason to keep a stable group alongside fresh ones.

You can also hunt deliberately. Ask your most competitive testers to try to break the game, and reward them for succeeding. Play greedy single-minded strategies yourself: what happens if a player only buys the cheapest cards, or never fights, or hoards one resource? If any of those degenerate plans keeps up with players making rich, varied decisions, you have found a problem. Designers borrow the term "solved" from game theory for the worst case, where the best move is known from every position.

Fixing dominance rarely requires deleting the strategy. Usually you make it interactive or situational instead. Add a counter that other players can choose (which turns the dominant line into a rock-paper-scissors layer), make its strength depend on game state so it is best sometimes rather than always, or price it so pursuing it costs tempo elsewhere. The goal is not that all strategies win equally often, but that the best choice depends on the situation and on what opponents are doing.