Dominion

13 Aug 2016

The What

The original deck building game, it takes traditional elements in economic games and pits the engine against the win condition. Works best at 3 to four players.

The Summary

Players alternate taking turns following these steps:

1. Actions: Play one action card and additional actions generated by actions.
2. Buys: Buy one card and additional card for buys generated by actions, spending coin generated from treasure cards.
3. Clean Up: Place all cards played that turn in the discard, draw 5 cards.

There are four types of cards:

• Victory: provides victory points, typically has no other affect.
• Curse: like victory cards but are a negative point value, typically associated with attacking cards.
• Treasure: provides a coin value to purchase cards.
• Action: effects that help generate more coins, provide more buys, provide more actions, or more card draws.
• Attack: action cards that are the only form of player interaction in Dominion.
• Reactions: action cards that act defensively to the effects of attack cards.

The game ends when there are no more province victory cards are depleted (no more of the card can be purchased) or when other types are cards are depleted. The person with the highest victory points total is the winner.

The Puzzle

The Golden Ratio

The puzzle is primarily in maintaining a deck ratio that allows for consistent coin value to purchase cards to improve the purchasing power of any given drawn hand.

Deck Fitness, Fight Bloat!

The smaller the deck the quicker it allows a player to utilize cards purchase cards and respond to strategies. However a smaller deck is also more vulnerable to the effects of attack cards as each card becomes more crucial to the strategy.

Curio

Each player starts with the same cards, but depending on what the perceive to be the best strategy. It is very interesting to see how decks diverge from one another, even with players with the same strategy.

The conundrum of buying victory cards, deck efficiency, and deck size makes the game stimulating.

Criticism

Equal Rights

In a perfect state, where all players understand the best move they can make in any given hand and understand the optimum combination of cards. The game is fairly deterministic, with the first player having a distinct advantage of being able to grab cards early and quickly.

All cards are also not created equal, one can argue there are specific strategies that require cards in conjunction to others. However in any given game there is only one optimal strategy given the available.

Another note is the shuffling of cards, for starting the game it is in your advantage to draw 5 coin, I believe it makes more sense to have the two starting hands be predetermined rather than shuffling prior to the start of the game.

It is unrealistic to play test every combination of the games releases and this makes balancing considerations to be moot especially at this point.

All that Glitters is not Gold

Historically the game’s end conditions were changed in response to an effective gold rush strategy in play testing (which is still viable, but playing with action cards had to become incentivized). The gold rush strategy essentially allowed players to ignore the action cards and play purely with …, playing in this way is fairly advantageous especially when attack cards play a significant role in play.

In their own worlds

Player interaction is typically capture purely in the attack cards, which are pesky, but are more detrimental to the attacking player as it takes actions and deck space.

Tips

• Focus on getting cards that efficiently allow you to get gold.
• Trashing seems counter intuitive at first but it is the best tool to maintain a efficient deck.
• Building a tempo, i.e. rhythmic purchasing pattern, will allow you to focus on figuring out the other player’s strategies.
• Shuffling your deck well will also improve the quality of any given hand, as the way the player turn works will inherently clump cards of various types together.

The Verdict

A classic design, that has been since improved upon and later developed games provide much more gaming sustenance. It was a breakthrough and unique for its time, however I would retire it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for the fact that it has the greatest card pool (meaning the most combinations of different cards in game) as well as being universally well known.

Other Games

• Ascension, a fantasy multiverse theme deck building game. Players are accumulating points, using cards that synergize off of cards similar to them. Suffers from the random draws that repopulate the lanes.
• Star/Hero Realms, not a fan it mashes the mechanics of ascension with mtg.
• Dominion Second Edition, it exists, 2nd Edition fixes and clarifies problems with the earlier edition.
• Thunderstone, a fantasy dungeon crawl variant where players defeat monsters, hire heroes and them.
• Arctic Scavengers, a focus on combat, a unique theme. I know its popular, that’s about it.
• Eminent Domain, a 4x deck building game. Not much exposure, but it seems to focus on the acquisition of planet cards and a space fleet. The deck building aspect is the actions you do and the efficiency of them.
• Xenoshyft, a cooperative take on the genre, combining tower defense elements a brutally difficult cooperative game against a deck of aliens.
• Smash Up, simplifies deck building by players picking two different 20 card presets. Not every combination is equal. The game is diminished by people picking their personally favorite combinations.