LogFAQs > #934747516

25. Dominion (2008)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Deck-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 25-40 minutes
Experience: 50-100 games online/vs AI with 2-3 players (2014-2015), 5-8 games in person with 2-6 (2015-2019)
Previous ranks: 8/100 (2016), 15/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player has a deck consisting of action cards, treasure cards, and victory point cards. Each turn, you can play one action and spend treasure to buy one card from a static marketplace. All cards drawn and purchased then go in the discard pile, and you draw a fresh new hand. When your deck is empty, you reshuffle your deck. When certain stacks in the marketplace are emptied, your score is the sum of the VP cards in your deck.

Experience - I played an absolute ton of Dominion before I properly got "in the hobby," online. Simple, addictive, yet with undeniable depth of strategy. Playing it in person is almost a bit of a disappointment, since tracking the number of gold or actions or buys in your turn is kind of tedious, and it got me used to expecting others' turns to move lightning-fast, too. Watching someone else draw out their deck in person is much less fun.

Design - Dominion is the granddaddy of the deck-builder. The genius of it is comes from the restraints it places on you. Since deckbuilders are such a well-worn genre, we can examine each design element of Dominion individually and see why it is still superior.

- The fixed market - Many deckbuilders, in an attempt to inject randomness (or something), give you a draftable market of available cards. This reduces overhead in setup and in reading the cards at the beginning of the game, but it makes the game less strategic. Dominion does have this overhead, but the tradeoff is that you can form a tremendous strategy, that you'll never be denied cards based on luck and that you won't have to read what cards do during the game.

- One action and one buy - Fantastic. The one-action part means you can't just pick up every good card, which is boring - you need to synergize them in the right ratios of extra-action cards, non-action cards, and of course those powerful action cards (like Smithy, the draw-3 card from the base set).

- You discard your entire hand on each turn, which means you must tune your deck to get the best five-card-draws - no waiting around for it to clear up.

- VP cards make your engine worse. This is arguably the most radical part of Dominion. It's without question an engine-builder (as deck-builders are), and like most engine-builders it has a point where you should "flip the switch." But other engine-builders don't actively punish you for flipping the switch too early the way Dominion does.

Future - I love the game for what it's been, but it scores more here on respect and past love than on current desire. For my taste, at this point, Dominion is arguably too pure. Its setup time and what downtime there is act against it. That said, if the right expansion is used for a 2-3-player game and everyone pitches in for the setup, I'm still game.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness