Dominion – game for old MTG’ers
If you haven’t played this gem yet, go do it now. For those that require some extra convincing, here’s some. Dominion is a game of reverse deck building and making your deck eventually to be the lean, mean machine that starts getting those points before the game ends.
I got this for christmas present last year and even though it took a few games to get the gears rolling, I’m nowadays absolutely in love with the game.
It shares many qualities with MTG, most importantly the deckbuilding that you actually do on the fly and also hand-management and combos that you can hopefully generate. It’s about having a deck where each draw should be useful. Add in to the mix the fact that each game is different (since a different mix of action cards is always chosen) and it gives you plenty of playability.
The Basics
Each player starts the game with a deck of 10. Three 1-point cards and seven money cards, each worth 1 coin. Each turn is very short, consisting of the player playing one action card (which neither has in the beginning), then using his money, buying cards that are available on the table. After this, he discards his remaining hand and pulls a new hand of five cards from the deck. If deck runs out, the discard pile is shuffled back in.
The Action Cards
The cool thing about the game is the action cards. The basic game comes with 25 unique action cards, a set of 10 cards of each. For each game, you can either choose or randomly pick 10 cards out of the 25 which are then set on the table as sets of 10 (So there’s 10 spies, 10 festivals etc).
Each card has a value of coins it costs (bottom left, see below) and once you buy it, the card is added to your discard pile and eventually through deck reshuffles, it ends up in your deck and eventually in your hand. During the buy phase, you can only buy one card, but action cards allow you to increase this amount and also can give you additional money to use.
Now, the first phase of your turn is to play an action card and the magic starts happening once you have a few in your deck. So the Market -card below would, upon being played, allow you to instantly draw one additional card from your deck, allow to take one more action (you’re limited to just one normally) and perhaps play another card and it also grants you an additional buy and 1 coin of money to boot.
Of course, with additional actions, you can probably start seeing all kinds of combinations you can do. With the Market -card being played, following up with Laboratory (see below) allows you to draw two additional cards and continue on with the actions.
This could lead you up to a big hand size, full of money and the possibility of doing couple of purchases in the upcoming buy -phase.
The Goal
Of course, building a deck and buying cards is all fun and good, but you are also pressed for time. The game ends when three full stacks of action cards have been bought away (so 3 stacks out of 10) or when the highest pile of score cards have been bought (there’s a pile of 1 point, 3 point and 6 point cards).
Of course, the point cards are only good when the game ends and are completely useless during the game. So the more point cards you buy, the more chances you have of drawing a hand of cards with useless point cards in them. And useless hands lead to one of the worst situations in the game which is to have a hand that you can do nothing with and just have to pass and discard.
On the other hand, if you start buying point cards too late in relation to your opponent’s actions, it might be you’ll never have time to buy enough.
Verdict
The beauty of the game is the simplicity. You can teach the game in about 5-10 minutes and a game shouldn’t last longer than an hour. Veterans will play through a game in 20-30 minutes and no matter which group you belong to, this game will hit you like a bag full of crack.
It has all the nuances of collectible card games, but none of the blindfolded booster/deck-buying and not knowing what you get. You can construct your decks on the fly and have different kinds of games each time.
The basic set is a little light on player interaction, but allow for a few kinds of nasties to be thrown at opponents. There’s an expansion (Dominion: Intrigue) out which adds more scheming and player-to-player conflict and the grapevine tells there’s about 6-10 expansions ready to roll.
So go buy it or try it out at Brettspielwelt. You won’t regret it!
And with that, this blog is off to a summer vacation and the boardgame shops of New York. See you in august!
edit: The Escapist has also noticed Dominion and writes about it here.
Tags: boardgame, ccg, deck building, mtg
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Boardgames, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.