Grrnade Santa

Dominion is a deck-building game that’s been around for a while. My gaming friends have pulled it off the shelf a few times in the last 2 years we’ve been playing and it’s always been a blast!

Everyone starts with the same ten cards. Every turn you draw 5 cards from your deck, buy what you can to improve your deck, throw it all in the discard pile and deal yourself another 5 cards. It’s that simple, but the difficulty is knowing what to buy when. Do you load up on currency to buy more cards? Buy offensive/defensive cards? Special Ability card? More cards that give you Victory Points but are otherwise useless placeholders in your deck? You have options!!

My favorite part of the game mechanics is no dice. Dice hate me and want to destroy me (kind of like cats). With deck-building, I can pack my own parachute, so to speak. If the right cards aren’t coming up, I didn’t build it right. Luck never hurts, but you can minimize your bad luck with a good build.

Cons of the game? Limited interaction with the other players. We’re supposed to be playing together, right? You can have several turns where nothing you do affects anyone. It’s almost multiple solo games played concurrently. Another minor drawback is setup/teardown takes a bit of time with all the different cards to put in their places.

I’m looking forward to introducing more friends to this game. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun to play.

I love this game. It’s not hard to learn, you don’t have to spend 10 minutes strategizing your turn, and you get to be a hotel tycoon without the bad hair!

Set up and tear down are the only slow parts. The rest of the game is pretty fast-paced.

Strategy can be as light or deep as you like. In the beginning each person tends to make and invest in their own hotels, but in the mid-game you have more choices than money. Do you diversify and get a piece of everything or do you focus on one or two and hope they grow the fastest?

Best advice: Try to get minority share holder in as many hotel take downs as you can. It’s hard to get top shareholder in a lot of hotels, but it can be as cheap as one share to get minority and get paid. It’s too easy to run out of cash in mid-game, so getting a lot of $1000-$2000 payouts makes a big difference.

Play this game with at least 3 players, four or five if you can. Enjoy!!

I enjoy playing co-op games. It takes some of the edge off the competition. I like to mix in co-op games with regular games for a good balance.

Defenders is great but there is a learning curve. Play it with someone with experience first.

Best advice: Plan ahead! If one character is spending 3 turns traveling across the map for a quest, another is clearing taint crystals, and a third is picking fights with a specific-colored minion just because he has a bonus, don’t be surprised when one of the Big Baddies waltzes into Monarch City and ends the game.

This is a great game. Enjoy it with friends!