2010-23: Dominion (new)
My first full review of the year will be of Dominion, the biggest “new hotness” of 2008-09, and winner of just about every game award it is possible to win. It is the first game of a completely new genre: the deck-building game. (In other words, it is a card game in which you choose the cards to add to your personal deck during the game, and the person who built the best deck wins. Kind-of like a backwards collectable card game, without any collectability. Or something like that.) Read on.
Dominion was designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, and published in 2008 by Rio Grande Games. Significantly, this was Rio Grande’s first-ever big success with an original game - they usually reprint titles by European designers. The game plays 2-4 players in 15-30 minutes. It was an instant, enormous hit world-wide, winning virtually every “Game of the Year” award on the planet. As such, it has already spawned several expansions (Dominion: Intrigue, Seaside, Alchemy, Prosperity), and several games that steal its mechanical underpinnings and apply them to different genres (Thunderstone, Arctic Scavengers).
The rules of Dominion are quite simple, although initially unintuitive. There are 3 types of cards: money, victory points, and “kingdom” cards. Money cards are subdivided into [$1/$2/$3] (copper/silver/gold). Victory points (“VPs”) are subdivided into [-1/1/3/6] (curse, estate, dutchy, province). You start with a deck of 10 cards in front of you, consisting of seven $1’s and three 1 VPs (7 copper, 3 estate). You shuffle these up, and draw 5 cards for your starting hand. The rest of the money and VP cards are placed in stacks in the center of the table.
In addition to money and VPs, there are 25 “kingdom” cards - the cards that actually do things. Each expansion contains 25 more types of kingdom cards (except for Alchemy, which is a half-sized expansion), so between the expansions and 3 promo cards that have been released, there are now 116 different kingdom cards. Out of these 116 possibilities, you choose 10 to play with - either a pre-determined 10 that work well together, or (my preferred method) 10 at random. There’s even a free iphone app for randomly choosing your 10 kingdom cards. At any rate, after you choose your 10 kingdom cards (and “cards” is a bit misleading - it’s a stack of 10 identical cards), you place them in the middle of the table, and you’re ready to play.
Playing Dominion is very simple: on your turn you get 1 “action” and 1 “buy.” A “buy” is simply discarding money cards in your hand and purchasing a single money, VP, or kingdom card from the center of the table, which you will then place in your discard pile. (Did I mention that every card in the game has a price, from $0-$8? Well, they do.)
An “action” is simply the act of playing a kingdom card from your hand. These kingdom cards all do different things, which break down into several broad categories: allow you to draw more cards, give you more money, give you more actions, give you more buys, allow you to “trash” a card (read: remove from the game, as opposed to discard to your personal discard pile), or allow you to attack the other players (e.g. by making them all discard down to 3 cards, or take a -1 VP card, etc.).
Certain kingdom cards work well together, others work at cross-purposes. The key to winning Dominion is the ability to look at today’s set of 10 random kingdom cards and figure out winning combinations of cards. It is this aspect that makes Dominion, among other things, a partial collectable card game replacement. I love building and tweaking CCG decks. But that’s a process that usually takes a long time, and requires lots of cards. I can get that same fix in 15 minutes with Dominion. No, it’s not as deep or strategic, but it’s surely cheaper and faster.
The other key to Dominion, as with so many other “VP engine” games is when to switch gears. The problem with VP cards (at least in the base game) is that they are worthless while you are actually playing the game. They do nothing. You can’t spend them as money, and you can’t spend them as your action. They just sit and clog up your hand. And they’re expensive - the 6VP card (the Province) costs $8. But. At the end of the game, the person with the most VPs in their deck is the winner. So you absolutely need to be buying them. But when?
The answer is that you need to build as efficient an engine as you can out of the kingdom cards available to you for the first part of the game, and then employ that engine to buy as many expensive VP cards as you can in the second part. Knowing when to switch from plan A to plan B is absolutely crucial.
Which reminds me, I failed to mention how the game ends. There are two triggers: 1) there are no more 6VP (Province) cards left to buy, or 2) 3 stacks of purchasable cards run out.
So that’s Dominion. As with most games, it has its pros and cons.
Pros: Fast, easy to learn, feels like a CCG, can have some complex strategies, expandable, the wife loves it.
Cons: 10 card decks + 5 cards in your hand = lots and lots of shuffling; lots of shuffling = lots of randomness; lots of shuffling = the cards wear out and your hands hurt; not as deep and satisfying as a CCG; might not be expensively collectable but it sure is expensively expandable.
Ambivalences: Choosing 10 kingdom cards at random to work with is certainly cool - it allows wild variability in the gameplay, and lets me freshly look for combos in every game. But it also means that sometimes you’re going to get a batch of cards that just don’t work well together. All cards that cost $5 or more, for example. Or tons of attack cards, but few defense cards.
My other real ambivalence is a leftover CCG thing. I enjoy building card combos and synergies, which Dominion allows me to do, and then tweaking them into a smoothly-functioning weapon of game-winning destruction, which Dominion absolutely does not allow me to do. The problem is that I enjoy part B more than part A, and so I always walk away from the game just a little unsatisfied. Non-retired CCG players (e.g. my wife) have no such feelings.
Overall, Dominion is well worth adding to your collection. It is certainly unique, and even if you don’t love it, it’ll make a fine 20-minute filler game while you are between rounds of other things. Very highly recommended.
Dominion was designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, and published in 2008 by Rio Grande Games. Significantly, this was Rio Grande’s first-ever big success with an original game - they usually reprint titles by European designers. The game plays 2-4 players in 15-30 minutes. It was an instant, enormous hit world-wide, winning virtually every “Game of the Year” award on the planet. As such, it has already spawned several expansions (Dominion: Intrigue, Seaside, Alchemy, Prosperity), and several games that steal its mechanical underpinnings and apply them to different genres (Thunderstone, Arctic Scavengers).
The rules of Dominion are quite simple, although initially unintuitive. There are 3 types of cards: money, victory points, and “kingdom” cards. Money cards are subdivided into [$1/$2/$3] (copper/silver/gold). Victory points (“VPs”) are subdivided into [-1/1/3/6] (curse, estate, dutchy, province). You start with a deck of 10 cards in front of you, consisting of seven $1’s and three 1 VPs (7 copper, 3 estate). You shuffle these up, and draw 5 cards for your starting hand. The rest of the money and VP cards are placed in stacks in the center of the table.
In addition to money and VPs, there are 25 “kingdom” cards - the cards that actually do things. Each expansion contains 25 more types of kingdom cards (except for Alchemy, which is a half-sized expansion), so between the expansions and 3 promo cards that have been released, there are now 116 different kingdom cards. Out of these 116 possibilities, you choose 10 to play with - either a pre-determined 10 that work well together, or (my preferred method) 10 at random. There’s even a free iphone app for randomly choosing your 10 kingdom cards. At any rate, after you choose your 10 kingdom cards (and “cards” is a bit misleading - it’s a stack of 10 identical cards), you place them in the middle of the table, and you’re ready to play.
Playing Dominion is very simple: on your turn you get 1 “action” and 1 “buy.” A “buy” is simply discarding money cards in your hand and purchasing a single money, VP, or kingdom card from the center of the table, which you will then place in your discard pile. (Did I mention that every card in the game has a price, from $0-$8? Well, they do.)
An “action” is simply the act of playing a kingdom card from your hand. These kingdom cards all do different things, which break down into several broad categories: allow you to draw more cards, give you more money, give you more actions, give you more buys, allow you to “trash” a card (read: remove from the game, as opposed to discard to your personal discard pile), or allow you to attack the other players (e.g. by making them all discard down to 3 cards, or take a -1 VP card, etc.).
Certain kingdom cards work well together, others work at cross-purposes. The key to winning Dominion is the ability to look at today’s set of 10 random kingdom cards and figure out winning combinations of cards. It is this aspect that makes Dominion, among other things, a partial collectable card game replacement. I love building and tweaking CCG decks. But that’s a process that usually takes a long time, and requires lots of cards. I can get that same fix in 15 minutes with Dominion. No, it’s not as deep or strategic, but it’s surely cheaper and faster.
The other key to Dominion, as with so many other “VP engine” games is when to switch gears. The problem with VP cards (at least in the base game) is that they are worthless while you are actually playing the game. They do nothing. You can’t spend them as money, and you can’t spend them as your action. They just sit and clog up your hand. And they’re expensive - the 6VP card (the Province) costs $8. But. At the end of the game, the person with the most VPs in their deck is the winner. So you absolutely need to be buying them. But when?
The answer is that you need to build as efficient an engine as you can out of the kingdom cards available to you for the first part of the game, and then employ that engine to buy as many expensive VP cards as you can in the second part. Knowing when to switch from plan A to plan B is absolutely crucial.
Which reminds me, I failed to mention how the game ends. There are two triggers: 1) there are no more 6VP (Province) cards left to buy, or 2) 3 stacks of purchasable cards run out.
So that’s Dominion. As with most games, it has its pros and cons.
Pros: Fast, easy to learn, feels like a CCG, can have some complex strategies, expandable, the wife loves it.
Cons: 10 card decks + 5 cards in your hand = lots and lots of shuffling; lots of shuffling = lots of randomness; lots of shuffling = the cards wear out and your hands hurt; not as deep and satisfying as a CCG; might not be expensively collectable but it sure is expensively expandable.
Ambivalences: Choosing 10 kingdom cards at random to work with is certainly cool - it allows wild variability in the gameplay, and lets me freshly look for combos in every game. But it also means that sometimes you’re going to get a batch of cards that just don’t work well together. All cards that cost $5 or more, for example. Or tons of attack cards, but few defense cards.
My other real ambivalence is a leftover CCG thing. I enjoy building card combos and synergies, which Dominion allows me to do, and then tweaking them into a smoothly-functioning weapon of game-winning destruction, which Dominion absolutely does not allow me to do. The problem is that I enjoy part B more than part A, and so I always walk away from the game just a little unsatisfied. Non-retired CCG players (e.g. my wife) have no such feelings.
Overall, Dominion is well worth adding to your collection. It is certainly unique, and even if you don’t love it, it’ll make a fine 20-minute filler game while you are between rounds of other things. Very highly recommended.