Dominion
Article by the Jolly Red Giant. --- Read more from this authorLast night the Guise Knights dug into Dominion for the first time. This is an interesting, fast paced card game that we all seemed to like.
What’s the what? In Dominion, players start with identical “decks” of ten cards each. On your turn, you generally start with a hand of five cards, play one action card, buy one card from the supply to add to your deck, discard everything you’ve played as well as your hand, and draw five new cards. There are three major types of cards – treasure cards, which are mainly used to pay for new cards in your deck, action cards, which allow you to do cool stuff on your turn, and victory cards. Victory cards each have a victory point value and at the end of the game, you count all the victory points in your deck (hand, library and graveyard for you Magic players.)
Victory point cards basically do nothing but waste draws and take up space until the end of the game, then they are the only thing that matters.
Action cards are the meat of the game. They might allow you to draw more cards into your hand, get free stuff from the supply, buy extra cards on your turn, or provide free coins to spend. Many have specialized
purposes – full blown instructions on the card. Some mess with your opponents, and when this happens it’s called an attack. The cool thing about attacks is they thunk all your opponents at once. The bad news, or
good news if you’re on the receiving end of such skull-duggery, is that there’s a Moat action card, which not only lets you draw extra cards on your turn, but when you’re being attacked you can show your Moat if it’s in your hand and block the attack from hitting you…and you still can watch your other opponents suffer! The most fun, however, seem to be action cards that give you more actions, while they do other stuff also. It was not uncommon in our first two games for people to turn their one action into five or six different actions on a turn.
Treasure cards are used primarily during the buy phase. There are three types, worth one, two or three coins each – Copper, Silver and Gold. Every card in the game has a cost – ranging from Copper treasure coins costing zero to Province victory cards, which cost eight coins and are worth a whopping six victory points each. After you’ve played your actions, you can buy one card from supply to add to your deck. Depending on the actions you played, you may have the right to buy more than one card, and you may start with some extra coins that turn. You then play treasure cards from your hand to cover the cost of the card you want. For example, if I played a Market, which amongst other things gives me
+1 Buy and +1 Coin, and I want to buy an Estate which costs two coins and and another Market which costs five coins, I can play two Gold from my hand. That’s worth 3 coins each, giving me six coins from treasure cards and one from my earlier market, allowing me to acquire both cards. Once I acquire them, they go into my discard pile, where they wait patiently for me to cycle through my deck, shuffle my discard back into my draw pile and play them. The supply consists of big stacks of treasure cards, medium size stacks of victory cards and ten stacks of ten action cards each. So if I buy the first Market, there are still 9 left for purchase by my opponents or by myself in future turns. The game provides 24 different types of
action cards (actually one, the Garden, is really a victory card) so you have some variety to your games. The game ends when either the Province supply (the 6 point victory card) is exhausted, or any three stacks of supply cards are exhausted (all of the Silver, Estates and Markets, for example.)
One last zone to talk about is the Trash – it’s basically an out of play zone. Sometimes you choose or are forced to remove a card from the game. These cards go in the Trash, where they are not cycled back into supply and cannot be reacquired. Trash is communal…no reason for it not to be.
What I Like
The components are nice, high quality card stock with pretty good illustrations and are easily read. Even the few actions that have complicated text are still pretty easily understood. The rules are clear, well written, and short, with the trademark Rio Grande summary running down the side. Teaching the game is fairly easy, if you don’t get bogged down in what each action card does.
The variety of action cards available make for different games every time. Turns move pretty fast, so the game is…dense. What I mean by that is that compared to a lot of games, you are doing stuff more often
than sitting waiting for others to do stuff. There seems to be limited analysis paralysis – people don’t have to spend more than a few seconds of thought on the vast majority of decisions. The game provides
“placeholder cards”, which can be used to randomly determine action cards as well as a reference for what cards do, when you are thinking about what to buy next. Buying victory cards help you win the game, but
they also slow down your deck, so there is a subtle mechanic to allow trailing players to catch up.
What I Don’t Like
While the mechanics of the game are easy to teach, new players can get intimidated by the fact that so many different cards are available to buy right away. So far it seems fairly obvious who has the lead – so
while the game can still be fun as your deck is still doing cool stuff, you can tell who’s buying the Province cards, and the mechanic to slow players down is so subtle that it may seem like catching up is hopeless,
or like victory is assured. Not a whole lot of tension as the game draws to a close. Hopefully this is mainly a factor of the players being new…more experience may lead to a more competitive game.
What I Hate
Shuffling.
You start by shuffling your deck of 10 cards. By the end of your second turn, you are about to shuffle your “deck” of likely 12 cards. By the end of the game, I’m guessing you’ve probably shuffled your deck about
15 times. This gets a little annoying in and of itself, but after just having blown about $40 on the game, I’m worried about the wear and tear factor. So much so in fact that I feel I’m going to have to buy sleeves.
At first I thought 500, one for every card in the game, will do, but now I realize I’m going to need at least 1,000 to plan for the promo sets, future expansions, etc…as my sleeves will need to be identical, even
for the expansion cards.
The box doesn’t provide a good solution for card storage – I suspect I’m going to want to buy a CCG/Trading Card box for these, and that’s too bad because the box art is really pretty.
The game doesn’t provide rules for play beyond 4 players – but really should be able to accommodate at least 5 with some variations on setup and end game conditions.
Closing Thoughts
Dominion is highly regarded by the boardgaming community and with good reason. It’s deep and fun without being too complicated. One of my benchmarks for any game is it needs to be over before it stops being
fun, and I think it actually ends just as it’s starting to get really fun…leaving you wanting more. I think I’m really going to like this one.
– The Jolly
Red Giant
Was Here!