Dominion Review
January 20, 2010 by Robert
Filed under Board Game Reviews
If you haven’t heard of Dominion, then you’ve probably just accidentally stumbled onto this site while looking for Sasha Grey videos. Anyone who has even a passing interest in tabletop gaming will almost certainly have heard about this juggernaut, this behemoth, this Dominion.
I like this game. I hate that font.
Dominion is a card game. It comes in a big old box, a “standard” sized board game box. But all that you get inside is a big stack of cards. Most of the cards are multiple copies of the same card. Your first impression when opening the box is “Oh, is this it? Oh shit. Oh shit. Should have bought Dungeon Twister 2!”
It works like this – you start with a small deck of cards, and draw some into your hand. Then you can spend cards from your hand to buy new cards from those laid out on the table. Then you discard the cards you buy. Then you discard any cards from your hand you haven’t spent. And that’s the game.
That really IS the game. When you get through your discard pile, you shuffle the whole lot into a new deck, and draw another hand. Your deck grows throughout the game, as you buy cards. Essentially, the game is the deck-building aspect of CCGs distilled into a half hour of quick thinking and strategy.
You win the game by having the most victory point cards in your deck at the end of the game. There’s a land grab for these cards near the end of the game, because the cards are entirely useless in the early part of the deck building process. You can’t spend them to buy cards, so they just clog up your deck like hateful things. And yet you need them to win. And so it becomes a game of immaculate timing. A game of judging just when to start making a dash for the prize.
So what about these cards that start on the table? The ones that you can buy? Well, some of them are treasure cards, and it’s essential to cash in regularly. For example, you can spend a few of your small change treasure cards to buy one treasure card of a higher denomination, and that will, when you get those discards reshuffled, put some extra funds into your deck. You can spend three of these…
...to get one of these.
The key thing to remember is that everything that you spend and everything that you buy goes into your discard pile and WILL come back into your deck. So you’re not really burning six coins to buy three in the example above. You’re burning six to secure nine.
Then there are the Action cards. These can be played at the start of your turn, and do various rule-breaking things. They allow you to draw more cards, offer additional opportunities to buy, additional opportunities to play Action cards and additional opportunities to fuck your opponents over.
There’s a real sense of building a little engine, a little economy machine, and in each turn you find yourself analysing the best way to get maximum productivity from your deck, and the best way to react to whatever process your opponent has in motion.
It sounds dull. I know it does. I’m sitting here explaining it and I know it sounds dull. But it isn’t. It all moves at a fair clip – draw, play cards, discard, discard, shuffle, draw. There’s a real thrill in watching your deck grow bigger with every turn, and when you’ve made some good buying decisions and find that a draw turns out a perfect little hand that you had visualised a few turns earlier, it’s as satisfying as cleaving a skull in Warhammer Quest or shooting a Genestealer in Space Hulk.
Okay, maybe not THAT satisfying.
There are 25 different Action cards in the base game, and you only ever play with 10 types at any one time. That means there’s a huge amount of replayability. The mind (okay, my mind) frankly boggles at the possibilities. Then there are the two new titles that are already on the market. Dominion: Intrigue, and Dominion: Seaside. Both introducing new cards to the game, both firmly on my Want List. This is a game that looks like it could run and run, and looks like it certainly intends to.
I’ll say one thing, though. Dominion is a fun game, but it might not be for everybody. Despite its current reputation in gaming as the monster that has forced everything else off the table, I think that there might be people out there who find it all a little bit sedate. You’ll get out of Dominion what you put into it. You’ll definitely enjoy it more if you’re the type of person who will notice the elegance of its design. It’s a gamer’s game, I think. Yep. Yep. That’s what I mean.
“It’s a gamer’s game.”
Oh no, I hadn’t heard of this before despite being a board game nerd!
*Commits Seppuku*
Sounds great, being a fan of M:TG the deck building aspect was half of the fun of it so actually making a game out of that sounds pretty genius to me.
How long does this game take to play and how many players can you play with? I am now tempted to look around for a copy …
I like to play Dominion on Brett Spiel Welt, the German website with lots of online games. It takes out the most tedious part of the game (the endless shuffling) and adds many conveniences such as adding up your money for you.
Duh: Half an hour, I should pay more attention
Naah Rab – I can’t agree with ‘it’s a gamer’s game’. You and Matt Drake of Drake’s Flames are singing it’s praises to the high heavens, but it’s not that good. It’s addictictive, I’ll give you that. It’s fast paced, I’ll give you that. & as the games last 15 minutes you’ll want another and another. It’s like Belgian chocolates. But it’s a tad repetitive. It is a tad samey. & as my 7 year old son nailed the Sod-Action-Buy-Gold-Buy-Victory strategy and kept beating me for weeks on end, I was glad to see the dastardly thing go on ebay! Now, if we’re talking card games – the Daddy is Magic: The Gathering – and I haven’t stopped playing that since DTT episode 8 (& oh! my bank manager loves you!)
I didn’t want to like this game but I found it very addictive the first time we played. Made the mistake of playing it again right after a game of BSG and the lack of a narrative really stood out. Which is not important if you don’t care about narrative. I care about narrative.
But Dominion is a very clever game, very addictive and is even better with the expansions.
We are still waiting for another donwtime town episode!
Norse, it definitely seems like a game where you can mash out some big aggressive GOLD GOLD GOLD strategy, but I’d imagine a crafty player could demolish that strategy with some nice card combos. I dunno. I’m not that guy, I ain’t that good.
I like it for what it is. I bet someone who is good at it would destroy other players nine times out of ten.
Yes, when I bought htis and played it I htough it was shit, BUT having forced myself to play a few more games I saw its amazing potential, not entirely my cup of tea but close enough to keep me playing.
My mate always used to make me play magic, I could never be arsed with the amount of time/money sink it would obviously require to be good at magic, so I was happy to basically be a doomed training partner playing the decks he constructed to spar with me. but I COULD see how great a game it was.
Dominion is kind of like getting into magic, colllecting all the cards, building your decks and testing them against other losers (bigger and smaller than yourself) BUT IN 30 MINUTES
Bang
done
over with
no more investment (of course you want the expansions though…..)
no more thinking
no more planning
Self contained in that 30 minutes
I like it, and can see why other people like it a whole lot more
Not enough goblins to kill in it for me though
apologies for typos by the way
Is it really bad to admit I haven’t picked it up because of the font? With the group of people play with, we don’t get a chance to play that often, so we’re still enjoying Agricola, 1960, War on Terror, C&C:A (hopefully!) – and every time I see the game on the shop’s shelf… Well I just recoil from the cover and move on.
With board games being such physical objects it just seems like the aesthetics are actually pretty important to me though (loath as I am to admit it). If I do buy it, I think it’ll be online where I don’t have to look at the cover in the queue (who am I kidding, I dream of the days when a game shop still had queues…).
Race for the Galaxy might come up first, I’m tempted to pick up a card-driven game for us to try and I think that might go across better (though that seems to have enough strange design choices of its own)
Anyone got any other suggestions or recommendations on a good card-based (non-collectible) game to try, for multiple players? Wish there was something based more on the real Space Race, that’d go down a fucking treat at work.
I’ve worked out what that font reminds me of now, it’s those ‘Sold Out’ budget PC games. Dominion is not going to look symmetrical no matter how many loopy Os you put in it, Rio!
I quite like Dominion but it’s not a very sociable game. What mostly happens is that we’ll all sit down, read out lists of cards like Rain Man for a bit (with the occasional “Oh, bastard!” as piles go) and then count up who wins. To me it feels like it’s missing some key component, if it had a little more direct interaction between players it’d be a real classic.