Nathan

I passed over this game for a while. I’ve tried a lot of the Asmadi games and haven’t really been that impressed with them. Their games kind of wear thin after a few plays. I did eventually cave after hearing good things about this game and ended up buying it on a whim.

I LOVE this game. It’s main focus is tactics instead of strategy. You kind of deal with the board as comes along and deal with the cards your opponents put out. I won’t be diving much into the rules, but I do want to go over some key points:

Components – This game comes with 100+ cards and each card is unique. They come in 5 different colors and each “age” has 10 cards total [except for age 1]. The cards are decent quality, but they don’t carry a linen finish. I sleeve everything and these work great with the Mayday Green Premium Sleeves. Just make sure you get clear sleeves since the backs play an important role in the game. The cards are fairly bland looking [which is why I skipped over it for a while], but after playing, any more pictures/icons on the card would just clutter it. The game also comes with a handful of achievement cards and 4 player mats that are thin cardboard. They work well enough and do their job just fine.

Gameplay – The game goes until enough achievements are claimed or if the players have to draw an ’11’ and can’t. There are other cards that have alternate win conditions on them which is the 3rd way to win the game. On you’re turn you have 2 actions you can use which include the following: Draw the highest card from the draw pile that you have out [if you have a 6 card out you draw a 6], “meld” a card [place a card down from your hand], use a cards “dogma” [use a cards actions that has been melded], or simply claim an achievement if you have a high enough score total. Pretty simple but each card can do some crazy things with other cards in front of you. I haven’t played this enough to figure out more than a small handful of fun card combinations, but just playing the game you’ll realize their is a lot to dive into. The game flows pretty quickly and you don’t ever feel like there is a lot of downtime.

Replayability – There is a ton of replayabilty in this set. With 100+ cards all unique, you’ve got a lot to learn and a lot to work with in unique and fun combinations. The game feels different every time and each game can be a complete swing of power near the end.

Negatives – This game is a great 2 player game and does scale well up to 4, HOWEVER it does become quite a bit more chaotic the more people you throw into the mix and I personally find this game is best played with just 2. This game is somewhat chaotic and can turn people off. It’s also a very aggressive game since you can demand cards from another player or completely tear apart a players starting area. It does have a luck of the draw kind of feel, but it really isn’t that bad. This game also takes up a lot of table space. The last negative is simply that the cards are kind of bland looking. They work for this game, but it was a deterrence for me for a while. Look past it and enjoy the game for what it truly is.

Overall Impressions – I LOVE this game and I feel like it’s a great item for any gamers collection. This is an extremely fun 2-4 player game that takes about 45 minutes. It is chaotic and aggressive, but it’s not the main focus of the game. Finding synergies with the cards is the main focus of the game and trying to utilize what you have in your tableau the best that you can while occasionally screwing over your opposition. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite games and hopefully it will for you too.

I honestly found this game a bit boring after the first couple plays. You’re whole goal of the game is to acquire as much money/points as possible by the end of the game. You do that by placing a race you’ve selected onto the board and conquer territories. This varies each game as each race has a special power and on top of that, each race gets a randomly selected special power to further the variance from game to game. Sometimes this makes incredibly broken characters [flying sorcerers anyone?] and not that great of characters at times.

The problem I have with the game is that it feels like a lot of small math problems as I play. Each territory you can take over is a base of 2 + any additional units or pieces on it. So taking over a mountain space is 2 + the mountain tile. Add a player who’s only got one token on that same mountain space and now you’ve got a place that needs 4 to take over. It gets kind of boring after a while.

I do think this game is great to break out every few months and have a couple beers while playing it, but beyond that it really doesn’t have much else going for it. Races/Powers can become broken in the right combination and it’s all a giant math problem to me. I do think however the artwork and components are great and the insert is one of the best I’ve ever seen. It also scales well from 2-5 players. Not a game I would spend $50 on, but it wasn’t a complete waste of money. I would recommend this game to new gamers or people that want a fairly casual game without too much thinking involved.

I’ve only played this game once, so my rating may be slightly skewed. This game is fun for about 20 minutes or so and the cards are hilarious [the first time seeing them, not so much after the 3rd or 4th]. So why isn’t this fun? It lasts WAY longer than 20 minutes and essentially the whole goal of the game is to drag it on way longer than it should be. You try to backstab and take down your opponents (which is fine) but in the end it takes a 20 minute game into an hour+ game. It’s also extremely chaotic, it’s luck of the draw for every card you get and you also sit on the mercy of your opponents…the ones that you just backstabbed…

Honestly, spend your $20 on a different game.

I enjoy this expansion for what it is. It adds a layer of chaos to this game and it’s where Carcassone went from being strategic to chaotic. I don’t recommend this expansion for people that don’t like getting their toes stepped on, but for anyone else that doesn’t mind a bit of conflict, this is the way to go. It’s definitely not something that gets played that often when we play Carcassone, but it really does mix it up every now and than. Plus the dragon meeple is awesome!

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.