As part of my continuing geek conversion to the way of boardgames, I’ve recently added to my collection. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research to try to make sure I only buy things I’m going to be able to play; that is to say, games that my friends and other half will play too. The one that kept coming up time and again was Dominion, so when I saw an offer on Amazon for 15% off the price, I saw it as an omen and ordered it :).
Ironically, this boardgame isn’t actually a boardgame in the true sense. It’s a deck-building card game, and a very, very good one at that (like I’ve got loads of experience to draw on, right?). To explain it properly would take pages here, and as complicated as the set-up sounds – and looks initially – it’s actually incredibly easy to get the hang of. I think it’s going to take a lot of playing to get good at strategy, but of the three people I’ve played it with so far, no-one’s taken more than about fifteen minutes to get the hang of. Everyone starts with exactly the same deck of cards which they draw a hand of five from. They play these cards in their turn which consists of A, B and C. A is for Action, and lets you play an action card which can do anything from giving you more actions or coins to spend, to forcing the other players to discard cards in their hands. B is the buy phase, where any coin cards in your hand can be spent on new actions, treasures, or victory point cards. Finally C, clean-up. The cards you played are added to your discard pile, any cards you bought also are, and so is the remainder of your hand. You draw five new cards from your deck and it’s next player’s turn. The only time this changes is when you no longer have five cards in your deck to draw, which is when you shuffle your discard pile (including any new cards you might have bought) and it now becomes your deck. So in essence you’re building your deck as you go, trying to do it tactically.
The trick comes in deciding how to build your deck. The ‘action’ cards are also called Kingdom cards, and you play with piles of ten different kinds (from a stock of 25 different types) of them. They represent buildings or people within your dominion. So on your turn you might think ‘now do I buy the Militia to give me two extra coins and force everyone else to discard two cards, or do I buy a Throne Room to allow me to play one of my action cards twice?‘. Finding a balance between increasing your own wealth, making sure you don’t have much rubbish in your deck, and hampering your opponents at the same time is an art. The variety of card types available mean no two games are the same, and when you throw in the load of expansions available, there’s a ridiculous number of possbilities.
The game ends on one of two conditions: firstly if all of the ‘Province’ victory point cards are bought, or secondly when any three piles of the action cards are depleted. At the end of the game everyone counts up the victory points in their decks and the person with the most, wins. It might sound simple, or boring, or whatever, but it’s actually really good fun, very addictive, and every game has at least one person having an ‘ahhhhh!’ moment when an idea for a tactic, or recognising what they’ve done wrong happens. There’s a load of expansions available, and given the response of everyone on BGG and the fact that sites such as dominionstrategy.com exist, it seems like it can easily get very competitive. I’d really recommend Dominion to anyone looking to get something to play either with their other half, or up to four people, but looking for a break from the Monopoly/Cluedo route of normal, off-the-shelf games.
As well as this one I also got the heads-up on some ridiculously cheap Rio Grande (same manufacturer as Dominion), highly rated games from an online retailer, so I’ve now got the infinitely nerdier Notre Dame and Hamburgum to try to learn too. Good times :).