Dominion

This is a deck-building card game in which players attempt to earn enough points to be the others.  Everyone starts with a basic hand of 7 copper coins and 3 estate cards (worth one point each).  Each turn you play off of your own individual deck.  The turn begins by drawing five cards.  You then have an action phase, in which you can play action cards.  Then there is the buy phase, which allows you to purchase new cards to add to your deck – these might be action cards, money cards, or victory point cards.  Finally, you end your turn by discarding all cards played and any that still remain in your hand into your own personal discard pile.  You immediately draw 5 new cards from your deck to prepare for your next turn.  When you run out of cards your deck gets reshuffled.  The game continues in this manner until either all of the province cards are gone (victory point cards worth 8 points) or when any other three stacks of cards have been exhausted.

2-4 players.  Multiple expansions and other stand-old versions available.  Approximately 30 minutes.  Easy-medium learning curve.

Becky says:

One nice thing about this game is that the basic rules are simple enough.  The variety of different action cards can make it seem a little overwhelming, but once you accept that you’re just going to have to take some time to read the cards and get to know them, the game can go pretty quickly.  One thing that I really like is how the playing experience can be different every time, depending on what cards you use.  There are pre-set arrangements that they recommend, but you can also just randomly select which cards will be played with for each game.

One thing that is both a pro and a con is that it can be very difficult to figure out what strategy you want to use, and that can change depending on which cards are used.  Many people I play with build up these amazing chains of action cards, going through almost their whole deck in one turn.  Somehow I just can’t get that strategy to work for me.  I find that if I’m buying action cards it means I can’t upgrade my coins, and if I have mostly action cards I don’t have enough coins to buy what I want anyway.  It’s a delicate balance that you have to find. 

I also love how fast paced the game is.  It’s not like Citadels, where I feel like we wait forever for everyone to make their selections, or even Bang!, where a turn can drag out for far too long.  I know Jason will complain that this game doesn’t move quickly enough for him, which frankly I don’t understand.  I find that half the time, by the time that I have drawn my cards for my next hand and figured out what I want to do with them, it’s already my turn again.  I will note that we don’t own this game, his brothers do, so we only play when they come over which means that it’s always a 4 person game.  It would be interesting for Jason to try 2 person Dominion and see if that fixes his issue with the pace.

While Dominion is a very good game, if I have to note some negatives I will say that it doesn’t always seem perfectly balanced, especially when you choose which cards to play with randomly.  Sometimes it feels like you are getting nowhere fast, so you might as well start buying Duchys so you can get some points.  And while I don’t have a problem with the general idea of the attack cards, some of them seem much worse than others and a few I personally feel are too harsh or annoying and don’t really add much to the game.

Overall I enjoy Dominion, but probably not as much as I could because Jason usually is resistant to play, and what fun is it to play a game when one of the players isn’t into it?  I still give it an 8 out of 10 as it’s a fun game and I am pretty much always willing to play it.

Jason says:

I was really fascinated with Dominion the first time I played it.  It was like a breath of fresh air.  It’s another one of those solitaire-feeling games, where you play your game, other people play their game, and (except for a few exceptional cases of indirect influence) everyone compares their work at the end of the game.  In my mind, I put it into the same style class as 7 Wonders.

Like Bang!, Dominion fills a void in my gaming heart that was once reserved for collectible card games.  Bang! fills the game playing part, but Dominion appeals to the deck-building fun.  Yes, a lot of the fun that people find in collectible games like Magic: The Gathering is the search for the perfect deck design.  Dominion knows this, and it turned that search into a game in and of itself.

Regretfully, the more I play Dominion, the less fond of it I have become.  It is fast-paced, especially for a game that goes by turns, but I still get impatient waiting for people to take their turns.  Normally I have the patience of an immortal, but Dominion just hits some spot in my brain that can’t seem to wait.  That complaint might just be my personal problem, so I think others should judge for themselves on that; let me know what you come up with.

My real gripe with the game is the Attack cards, the part that makes people interact more directly.  Because the game feels like such a personal endeavor, attacks and disruptions feels contrary to the spirit of the game.  Also, they make the game slow down more.

I rate it a 6.6/11, which really just comes out to 6/10.  Even though it is one of the lower scores I have given and despite how critical I am of it, I do enjoy playing it, and there are many times I would rather play Dominion than games like Pandemic or Bohnanza.  I will point out that almost everyone I play games with disagrees with how low a score I gave to Dominion, but because of how impatient the game makes me, I'm sticking with my decision.