Dominion

After first playing Dominion a few years ago, I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the drive home. Or the next day. Or the following. As I think back, this was due to Dominion exciting the part of my brain that was formerly excited by playing a number of different collectible card games (CCGs).

I played Magic from ~’94-’00 and for a few years after off-and-on, much of that time focusing on tournaments. The two main features I enjoyed with Magic were: (1) figuring out how cards worked together, then building and refining a deck, and (2) analyzing in-game positions and adjusting to what your opponents are doing.

Many games currently on the market address the latter for me, but Dominion was the first to non-CCG to address the former.

My friends and I would spend time basing decks around individual cards. We’d typically take cards that others deemed “worthless”, and design a strategy around it. Dominion allows for this sort of thinking.

With 25 kingdom cards in the base set (you use 10 per game), you have many different strategies you can develop, and practice pairing cards together. You’re not only adapting to your opponents, but you’re adapting to what the game makes available as well. While everyone starts with the same 10 cards, by the end, player’s decks can look very different.

This is a place where the popularity of Dominion may currently serve as a detriment. Initially, people were experimenting and trying many combinations. Over time, certain strategies emerged, and through the internet, a base of knowledge was formed. Now, instead of players learning all of this information for themselves, they can go and read what others have found. Instead of trying to “learn” what cards go together through play and testing, they “learn” from what others tell them, often without experimentation and verification.

As the internet became more prevalent in the mid-late ’90s, I saw the same thing happen with Magic, which in part led to my leaving the game.

If you like learning about strategy for yourself, Dominion can be a great game; if you have a like-minded group. Such a person may do well to avoid either highly experienced players that only care about “optimum” play, or groups that want to skip the learning curve and be told what the best/worst cards are (a problem I also see with Puerto Rico).

A major bonus of the game is how easy it is to learn, once you see how the deck building aspect works. From my experience, many newer players have a hard time grasping the concept when explained to them, but as soon as they see two or three mock turns, it makes perfect sense (something I’ve also seen in Killer Bunnies, and 7 Wonders).

I’d recommend initially limiting yourself to the base set until you’ve tried the cards, and then slowly adding one expansion at a time (if you’re looking for more challenge/strategy). In my opinion, trying to jump into a multiple expansion game (or teach a new player this way), while it may work, is more likely to limit your/their enjoyment of the game.

Dominion has become a cheaper (depending on how many expansions you buy!) way to scratch the itch of a former CCG deck builder, while also offering enjoyment to both experienced and novice game players. If you don’t mind the relative lack of interaction with your opponents, Dominion should be on your list of games to try!

Premise:
Dominion is the first ever (to my knowledge) deck-building card game. That’s not a game where you build a deck and then play (Magic: The Gathering); that’s a game where building the deck is the goal of the game, and the bulk of every turn. Each turn, you will use 5 of the cards in your deck as your hand, and play the “Action” cards among them to extract whatever effects they have. They might provide more card draws to use, more options for playing cards, or the power to mess with your opponents’ decks, or more coinage to spend in the next step. After those actions, you play the treasures you have in hand, and you buy new cards to add to your deck. The new cards you buy go first into your discard pile, and you will have to wait for your deck to empty before you can shuffle them up and make your new deck, including whatever card’s you’ve purchased and whatever you had already. The self-improving nature of dominion decks means that there are always choices to be made as to what might be better for your deck, what is good to deprive opponents of, and when might be the right time to start the final rush for points toward the end of the game.

Learning:
The mechanics of dominion are so elegantly simple that they take less than a minute to explain.
The goal is a bit more ethereal, as new players often have a hard time grasping what they should buy, or what sort of approach to the game should be taken. Not to say it’s difficult to learn though, just toughing it through the first game will get almost everyone into the right mindset and introduce them to the flow enough to play decently game 2.

Length:
Dominion takes no more than half an hour in almost all circumstances. First game might be a bit slow, as the new players will be asking questions every turn, but after that, gameplay is smooth, snappy and uninterrupted. You can get into circumstances where turns take quite a while, because of cards that chain one another until you’ve played your whole deck every turn. This is easily avoidable, by simply realizing it’s not the way to win, and by selecting cards that avoid the phenomenon.

Depth:
The base set of Dominion comes with 25 “Kingdom” cards which are the meat of the game. In a given game, you’ll select 10 of these (randomly or arbitrarily) and use those exclusive for the duration of the game. This variety and variation means that there are endless new combinations of cards and mechanics in each game, so the strategy doesn’t go stale quickly.

Strategy:
The best player will win 70% (approximately, by rough observation) of the time. Bad draws can kill a game for a player, but it is normally bad choices that lead to those draws. If you buy cards to put in your deck, and later regret drawing them, you most likely bought the wrong cards, or bought them in a bad proportion. Skilled players will know what sorts of cards their deck needs and what sorts it has enough of, which will minimize greatly the occurrence of dead draws.

Expansions:
There are (as of writing this) six expansions for Dominion, each of which adds between 12 and 26 new Kingdom cards to the base set, and some of which add other new components and ideas also. A full set of Dominion means 142 different Kingdom cards (not counting hard-to-find promotional cards) and 664 226 242 466 073 different possible sets of ten (thanks wolfram alpha). I have played all of the expansions, and I have enjoyed them all.

Conclusion:
Dominion is one of the best, smoothest, most replayable boardgames ever to see cardboard. Buy it. Play it. Love it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m in the few that don’t enjoy this game quite as much as everyone else. The game is incredibly easy to learn and it’s actually a great way to get new people to think outside of the box for boardgaming:

“What do you mean there are no dice?”
“Where is the board?”

So let’s break this down a little bit and give it a brief review:

Components – The cards are fairly thick and will take quite a bit of abuse before you either need to sleeve them or purchase a new copy. Personally I sleeve everything and Dominion is no exception. I do have a buddy that plays this game quite often and over time his Estates have become worn down as well as the copper cards. It’s not a problem most of the time, but people do mention that you do have a slight advantage if you know it’s a copper or an estate on the top of your deck.

The insert is fairly nice and it allows the cards to be put back in a mostly coherent way. It fits the cards sleeved [mostly] but it simple does not allow any room for expansions to be placed in the box.

Gameplay – The gameplay is broken down into 3 phases. I won’t be going into much detail on this, but I will run over it briefly. The first phase is the action phase. This is where the meat of the game is. You can play an action card from your hand which allows you to do various things such as draw more cards, give you more actions so you can play other action cards from your hands or finally simply give you a way to get additional money. There are others, but for the sake of keeping this short I’ll leave that be. This is where my negative feeling of the game comes into play. Essentially you sit back and let the other player do what he can with his hand. There is simply no way to stop what he’s doing. Now normally I don’t have a problem with these type of games, but with this game you can run into a substantial amount of downtime if they end up filtering through their deck, playing more actions, putting cards back into the deck in a certain way, etc. This is only amplified with 4 players.

The next phase is the buy phase. You can purchase from 10 randomly chosen piles from the common area. You use any money you’ve accumulated from either action cards or any copper/silver/gold cards you’ve just played. This also can take a while for some people to sit and read each card or debate whether they want this card now or later. This becomes less of a problem as players learn the cards, but it still exists when players work out which cards work together and which don’t each time a new set of cards comes out.

Replayabiltiy – The base game has a good amount of replayability for a while, but there is only so far 25 different action cards can go. That’s where I both love and loathe this game. It already has 5 expansions and supposedly it will stop at around 8. If Rio Grande can do anything about it, it will probably continue producing more. The fun part of the game is finding fun combos with the expansions/base game. Getting cards to synergize together is great and really gives this game a strategic feel. I really only feel like I need 1 or 2 expansions for the base game since getting any more is a hassle to try to mix and match cards.

Overall Impressions In the end I won’t turn down a game of Dominion, but it’s not exactly something I would grab for while choosing a game. It’s got a soft spot in my heart since it’s the game that brought me into this hobby. I just can’t overlook it’s flaws any more and have found other deck building games that fill what I’m looking for better [Nightfall for direct confrontation or Thunderstone for a sense of theme and accomplishment]. I feel that Dominion also has a pasted on theme. It really could have been anything and still played the same. Overall I recommend this game to people new to the hobby or people who are looking for something with very low confrontation in a game.

Like Magic the Gathering, its inspirational forebear before it, Donald X. Vaccarino’s Dominion has established and defined a brand new genre of game. In Dominion’s case, it is the Deck Building Game and it has inspired a host of other games with its engaging formula. However unlike Magic, whose early competition tended to be fairly weak games in comparison, Dominion has seen competition in what is arguably a much stronger hobby games market than 20 years ago both from a game design and market size standpoint. Many of Dominion’s successors are arguably tussling for the position of the Number 1 Deck Building Game. So how well does Dominion stand up to its fairly fierce competition?

Dominion is as a game brilliant in both its conception and execution. It’s a simple idea really. Everyone starts with the same basic deck and then proceeds to customize it into an efficient victory point reaping engine by buying new cards from a common pool and adding them to their deck. With the current game’s pool being made up of only 10 different types out of a total range of 25 types in the initial Dominion set you’re guaranteed of having a different experience every time you play. Unless of course you decide to replay that favourite set of cards. Dominion rewards players with the ability to look at a given set of cards and work out the best combinations and ratios to put into their deck. The way Mr. Vaccarino has taken the idea of Magic the Gathering’s deck-building meta game and crafted it into a game in its own right is genius. It’s one of those ideas that you later scratch your head and wonder why no one had thought of it sooner.

On the whole, Rio Grande Games have done an excellent job of the production. Notably the insert, at least at the time, was a work of extremely considerate genius as it made sorting and accessing the various types of cards much easier and I won’t hold the fact that it doesn’t work quite as well when the cards have been sleeved against them. And while these days I would perhaps lean more towards the Thunderstone option of having a number of deep wells and card dividers for sorting the cards, the original design is still extremely functional.

Sadly, the art on the cards does leave me a little cold. While each piece does match up with the title of the card reasonably well, the style overall does nothing for me. For the most part they’re just a bit too blocky and simplistic (although some pieces do have a lot more detail). What I will commend Rio Grande Games on however is maintaining a fairly consistent style amongst the eight artists who have contributed art to this set of cards.

Now, I’m personally a very thematically oriented game player. I love seeing game mechanisms which make sense and are well integrated with the theme of the game. The more a game tends towards the abstract, the less likely it is that the game will work for me. And this is where Dominion should by all rights fall flat for me. I quite like the rather tongue in cheek humour used for the theme and I totally get the connections between the different titles of the cards and their respective mechanics. They make sense. I even like the odd bit of mechanical humour on cards like Feast. But when I’m playing the game I really don’t feel any of it. I don’t feel like a monarch expanding my realm through the use of bureaucracy or woodcutters or whatever. I feel like I’m trying to create a deck that can string together a bunch of different actions so I can get a fistful of money cards to buy me a Province and win the game. The gameplay just feels totally mechanical to me. I think that games like Thunderstone, Rune Age and others have done a better job of creating a game that conveys its theme while you play.

But ironically, I still like Dominion more. A lot more.

There is just something undeniably brilliant about Dominion’s design. It just works perfectly. Even after you’ve mixed lots of expansions in, the game still rarely misses a beat. This has a lot to do I suspect with the fact that Dominion as a complete product (the base game and almost all of its expansions) had been designed and play-tested before the first game ever went on sale. This is something that those who have followed haven’t had the advantage of doing in their rush to market.

And ultimately for me, Dominion plays fast. Experienced players will knock out a game easily in 20-30 minutes. Other games like Thunderstone and Rune Age take a lot longer. And there is just something really satisfying about being able to play through several quick and varied games of Dominion in the time that I would have spent playing one of those more thematic games.

Dominion: Arguably Bland. Undeniably Brilliant.

What Is It About? – An Overview of the Game
Dominion is the patriarch of the deck-building genre, moving what was once “preparation” of modern card games into the game itself. From humble beginnings of a few estates and a pocketful of copper coins, you build your great Dominion.

The game is played from 2 to 4 players. Players take turns playing cards from their hands for actions and money to purchase more cards from a common supply. The game ends when 3 supply decks or the Province supply deck are exhausted. The player with the most VPs in their deck wins.

What Do I Get? – The Components in the Box
Opening the box may come as a surprise since it is a standard 12” x 12” game box but contains only 500 cards. However, the plastic insert is perfectly designed to organize and hold all the cards by type. Even sleeved cards, with some slight rearranging, can fit in the insert with little problem.

Cards are divided into the “basic supply” of coins, victory point cards, curses, and the trash indicator. These are used in every game. The “kingdom cards” make up most of the balance of the cards and are divided into 25 sets. In any given game, only 10 of these sets will be used. Sets can be selected randomly or with a pre-determined “scenarios” that highlight certain combos. The remaining cards are “randomizers” that can be used in selecting the sets. Be careful though: they look exactly like the real cards but have a slight change of color on their back.

What Do I Do? – Playing the Game
The game is extremely simple in terms of sequence of play. Easy as ABC! Players start with a hand of 5 cards. They may play one card for their Action. The Action is then fully resolved. They may then play as many Treasure cards from their hand to generate purchasing power for the Buy phase. Again, they may Buy 1 card up to their Treasure amount, placing it in their discard. Finally, they Clean-up there play area by placing all cards played (including any remaining cards in hand) into their discard pile. They finish their turn by drawing 5 new cards, reshuffling their discard to replenish their deck if needing to draw more cards. Play then continues to the player on your left.

The complexity comes from using the Action cards to generate more Actions, more Buys, more Coins, more Draws from their deck, or the “Event” on their cards that allows something to happen. The goal should be to build an efficient engine of card combos that lets you build up to the expensive Province card (8 coins) and drive the game to its conclusion.

The disadvantage of buying Victory cards is that they offer no Action and no Coin. In other words, they clog your deck and prevent your hand from having lots of options. A balance must be found when to switch from building your engine to buying your points. The game will end at the end of any player’s turn when the Province supply (8 cards in games with 2 players or 12 cards with 3-4) is exhausted or any three other supplies are exhausted. Victory cards are counted whether in hand, in your deck, or in your discard pile. The player with the most VPs wins.

What Do I Think? – Final Thoughts
As a former crack addict (and by crack, I mean the cardboard kind), I have wanted a good card game that wouldn’t drain my wallet with a rarity structure. Dominion has scratched that itch. The variety of combinations of Kingdom cards is vast with only 10 of 25 being used in any game.

The game plays very quick and is fairly easy to teach. The cards are text heavy though use standardized phrases to keep it as simple as possible. It is easy to introduce to new players, though it will take them some time to get familiar with all the cards. Games with experienced players go very fast as they know what they want and can play their turn lightening fast.

This game has held up for me, having first played it in 2008. I continue to play it daily on my Droid, getting anywhere from 3-5 plays in a day.

The only drawback with just the base set is that it can lack a lot of interaction between players. There are only 4 Action cards that allow direct conflict with other players and so if these are missing, it is just a race to the finish. However, there is always the possibility of buying a card away from someone before they have a chance to get it themselves before the game ends. This is mostly addressed with the expansions.

What Next? – Other Recommendations for this Game
Though not a collectible game, the expansions for this game continue to churn out at a decent clip. The most recent expansion, Dark Ages, is slated to be the penultimate addition to the game. Each of the expansions offers “more of the same” giving even more kingdom cards (almost to 200) making the combinations near limitless. However, each introduces one or more new mechanics that spices up the game without changing the fundamentals. I would rank the expansions as follows (click on the titles to see my review of those expansions):

Prosperity – Expands the game with bigger money (that does stuff) and bigger victory cards.
Hinterlands – Allowing you to do stuff when you gain the card.
Seaside – Introducing duration cards that last for two rounds, effectively increasing your hand size.
Cornucopia – Rewarding diverse decks over efficient ones.
Intrigue – A second version of the base game offering more interaction between players.
Alchemy – This is a strange bird that is more a standalone expansion given its dependence on a special Treasure (the Potion) but includes some very unique and powerful cards.
Dark Ages – TBD! This expansion offers more Kingdom cards than any other expansion and introduces quite a few new mechanics. This looks like a promising addition that will eventually top the list.