Rio Grande Games
My Rating: 4/5
Dominion was a unique pick-up for us, as we had not previously played any board/card game quite like this before. Stick with me here as I dig a little bit deeper.
I grew up playing the Pokemon: Trading Card Game and enjoy the online console versions of Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers. In these collectible/trading card games, you buy booster packs (like packs of baseball/football cards) to add cards to your collection. Once you get so many cards, you begin crafting and managing decks of cards to compete and play against other players. Just managing your deck brings in a lot of intricate strategy to the game before you ever take to the competitive playing field. For example, you have to balance out your creatures just right... if you have too many cheap guys, chances are you will not hold up in the end stages of the game, if you have too many expensive guys, chances are you will not be able to afford to play them and get overrun at the beginning of the game. Another example, you are always searching for the ideal "mana curve," the balance between your action/creature cards and your mana/land/energy cards. If not carefully balanced, you'll end up with a bunch of action/creature cards and no way to play them, or a bunch of mana/land/energy and nothing to use it on.
Dominion takes all of these intricate mechanics and creates an entire game based on deck-building. In Dominion, you are a monarch responsible for building and developing your kingdom (i.e. your deck of cards). Every player starts with the exact same ten cards: Seven coppers (worth one treasure each) and three estates (worth one victory point each). In the middle of the table is a collection of cards known as the supply. Each player, with the exact same options to choose from as everyone else, purchases cards from the supply with the coppers in their hand to further develop their deck. The goal is to have the most victory points in your deck at the end of the game.
The gameplay itself is quite simple. You start with five cards in hand, and your hand consists of three phases, conveniently labelled ABC.
A) Action phase: You may play 1 action card that you drew
B) Buy phase: You may buy 1 card from the supply with treasure cards
C) Clean-up phase: Your entire hand goes into the discard pile
You draw five more cards, and when your draw pile runs out, you shuffle your discard pile back into the draw pile.
There are three types of cards in the supply that you can purchase: Treasure cards, Victory cards, and Kingdom cards.
There will always be at least three types of Treasure cards in the supply:
Copper - Costs 0 treasure, worth 1 treasure
Silver - Costs 3 treasure, worth 2 treasure
Gold - Costs 6 treasure, worth 3 treasure
There will always be at least three types of Victory cards in the supply:
Estate - Costs 2 treasure, worth 1 victory point
Duchy - Costs 5 treasure, worth 3 victory points
Province - Costs 8 treasure, worth 6 victory points
Of course, it would be far too simple to just race each other and see who can buy the most victory cards. You see, the victory cards are not worth a thing until the end of the game. The issue should be clear here, if you stock up on victory cards early on and you only get to draw draw five cards, the victory cards will choke your deck and render you unable to buy other cards from the supply, much less ever afford the more expensive victory cards.
This brings us to the basic card type in the supply: Kingdom cards. You typically have ten different types of Kingdom cards available in the supply, and this is where all of the fun comes in. Take these three cards for example. The Smithy card allows you to draw extra cards on your turn. The Militia card gives you two more treasure to spend in your buy phase and allows you to attack the other players, forcing them to discard cards from their hand. The Laboratory card gives you additional actions and allows you to play more cards on your turn.
Now you can see, it is not a contest to see who can grab victory cards the fastest, but rather a contest of who can figure out potential combos within the Kingdom cards to make their deck more efficient than everyone else's. Take the example above, look what happens if I buy several Laboratory and Smithy cards from the supply. I can play a Laboratory card in my action phase that lets me do additional actions and allows me to also play a Smithy card on the same turn. Now I get three extra cards to draw, and what happens if I draw another Laboratory? I get even more actions. What if I draw another Smithy as well? Even more cards to draw. It's possible, with the right combination of cards, that I could draw through my entire deck in one turn. What does that accomplish? Well, if I am also buying silver and gold from the supply, that means that I now have access to all of the treasure in my deck. Throw in a Market card that allows multiple purchases, and all of a sudden I may be able to buy two Provinces in one turn.
What about people who play the game frequently? Wouldn't they memorize all the potential combinations between the ten Kingdom cards and know which ones work best? Wouldn't the game eventually just become a race for certain Kingdom cards? And that is where Dominion's last twist comes in. There are actually twenty-five Kingdom cards that come with the game, and you randomly select just ten of those to play with. This adds a ton of variety to the game, and you are never allowed to rely on specific combos, as those cards you rely on might not show up for the next game. Thus, Dominion becomes a game of thinking on your feet and making decisions on the fly.
You can tell why I like this game. Everyone starts with the same deck, everyone has the same decisions available to them, and there is very little luck involved in the game at all. The game is almost always decided by whom the faster thinker is that can make their deck the most efficient on the fly. So, I am going to kick butt at this game and win all the time, right?
Game 1
Katie: 51
Matt: 30
Game 2
Katie: 37
Matt: 49
Game 3
Matt: 50
Game 4
Matt: 42
Game 5
Matt: 36
Game 6
Matt: 39
So, there you have it, I was down two games to four when we started our seventh game, which I recapped below so you can get a feel for the flow of the game. It seems as though the first three games were learning experiences with large margins of victory (average: just under 16 pts/game). In the following three games, the margins of victory dropped (average: just under 3 pts/game) and the games were much closer with me losing all three!
Having played through all of the recommended pre-sets in the instruction manual, we shuffled the randomizer cards and set out 10 random sets of Kingdom cards. The first card that catches my eye as we look over our selection in the supply is the Gardens card. The Gardens is an additional Victory card that costs just 4 treasure and gives you a victory point for every 10 cards in your deck. Thus, if you manage to get 60 cards in your deck, a Gardens card is worth as much as a Province for half the price. My first instinct then is to buy up as many of the Gardens as I can while going for a big deck.
The majority of the Kingdom cards I picked up were Workshops and Cellars, which I balanced with treasure cards. Workshops cost 3 treasure and allow you to gain another card costing up to 4 treasure for free. Thus, any time I got a Workshop into play, I was able to gain two cards per hand. The negative effect of going after Gardens cards early is they do not do anything in your hand. To compensate for this, I picked up a few Cellar cards. The Cellar lets you discard cards from your hand and draw new ones, a nice solution for dumping useless victory cards and hopefully getting more treasure to buy stuff with.
When I began using the Workshops to grab Gardens, in addition to purchasing a second card (even if it was free copper), Katie quickly caught on to my strategy and saw that I was trying to rush through all the Gardens. She normally works up an elaborate + Actions/+ Cards engine, but she abandoned this in favor of going straight for treasure cards, a big money strategy to clean out the Provinces before I got to them.
We did realize at the end of the game that I had mistakenly dropped the whole pile of Gardens into the game without counting them. I thought there would be 10 in the set, like the rest of the Kingdom cards, but it appears there are 12 in the set, like the rest of the Victory cards. Without looking at the rules, I assume that (for a two-player game) we were actually only supposed to put 8 Gardens into the Supply. Oops! This may have slightly inflated our scores for this game, if nothing else.
Anyway, in hindsight, looking back at my deck and the available cards and how I might have changed things, I believe my mistake was not picking up enough treasure to balance out the Workshops and Gardens. My deck began getting choked with victory cards and I often had to settle for buying the free Copper instead of higher-quality cards. My deck consistently grew as desired, however my buying power was constantly low and I picked up a minimal amount of Gold and Provinces. Because of this, Katie was able to effectively buy up most of the Provinces with little competition.
I knew going into the end of the game that it was going to be close, and figured that it would come down to how many cards I had in my deck. If I managed to get 60 cards and make my Gardens worth as much as her Provinces, I should win. She grabbed the last Province, and we began tallying our cards up. I had 56 cards, just shy of the 60 mark that I believed I needed.
Victory Points in Matt's Deck
2 x Provinces = 12 pts
9 x Gardens (5 pts ea for my deck) = 45 pts
3 x Duchies = 9 pts
5 x Estates = 5 pts
Total: 71 points
That was a great deal higher than we had ever scored before, but I knew I was at the bottom of a 2-6 Province split and this was still going to be close.
Victory Points in Katie's Deck
6 x Provinces = 36 pts
3 x Gardens (4 pts ea for her deck) = 12 pts
5 x Duchies = 15 pts
8 x Estates = 8 pts
Total: 71 points
Yep, all those points and, unbelievably, we tied 71-71. I just needed four more cards in my deck to win 80-71. Sigh. =) Since I started the game and Katie ended it on her turn, we ended up with the same amount of turns and thus no tiebreaker.
Series History
Katie: 4-2-1
Matt: 2-4-1
And that's Dominion for you. There are several expansion packs out that add to the 25 sets of Kingdom cards in the base game, giving you more Dominion game variants than you could possibly play through in a life time (last count, courtesy of the BoardGameGeek forum: 81,572,506,886,508... that's well over 81 trillion potential Kingdom card sets). So, clearly, if you enjoy Dominion's gameplay concept, you will never run into a lack of replayability issue.
In a couple short weeks, this has already become a favorite game of ours, and I look forward to more Dominion session reports as I (hopefully) close the small lead Katie has on me so far. ;)
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