Dominion Review

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.”

Dominion: Intrigue – This Week

Rio Grande Games’ Dominion: Intrigue, the expansion for the highly rated card game Dominion, is out this week. Here’s what the publisher tells us about the new box:

Dominion: Intrigue adds rules for playing with up to 8 players at two tables or for playing a single game with up to 6 players. This game adds 25 new Kingdom cards and a complete set of Treasure and Victory cards. The game can be played alone by players experienced in Dominion or with the basic game of Dominion.

Dominion is a game we haven’t played yet, so we’re not sure how exciting this news is. But an expansion for a popular game is always a good thing, right?

NOT FOR YOUR WALLET IT’S NOT! (Assuming you have a wallet, that is. Or a purse. You might just stuff your money into your underwear for all we know. We’re not judging anyone.)