Dominion

Deck builders are a big market for board games. Any game that gives players access to a pool of cards and the freedom to pick and choose which ones they want to utilise to put in their deck is an obvious hit.


You’ve got your different flavours and set ups of deck-builder's:
-fantasy theme with Star/Hero Realms - sci-fi and medieval respectfully - a deck builder mixed with a battle system where cards gain bonuses based on a tribal theme.
-Deck building adventures like Clank where players are using the cards from the pool to defeat minions and find loot, more along the lines of a dungeon crawler.
-Then you have game like Aeons End, the end boss to Clank’s dungeon crawl adventure, where players are working together fighting against one big boss all the while building their deck from a card pool.

Dominion is a more straight forward deck-builder. No story, no adventure, no end boss, just a pool of cards and some players. The aim that players are trying to achieve in Dominion is to have the most victory points at the end of the game. To fulfill this players will have the chance to purchase different cards throughout the game from the card pool, which will include victory point cards.

When setting up a game of Dominion players will choose ten different cards from the available cards in the box, these will become the card pool that players will be building from. Along with those ten different cards there are three different victory point cards and three different money cards that are added to the pool. Players start off with a mix of Coppers and Estates (the lowest forms of money and victory points respectfully) and take it in turns to purchase cards from the pool to add to their decks. Cards available to players will offer effects that increase the amount actions your can take in a turn, draw extra cards, give you additional money for other purchases and can even provide a negative effect for your opponents. Some cards may just provide you with an effect rather than increasing what you can do in a turn.

 

Dominion is going to be celebrating its tenth birthday this year and the reason for its longevity, in my opinion, is the great amount of cards you have access to. Thanks to the 8 different editions of Dominion there is such a vast variety of cards, which means there are a lot of configurations of the card pool. Add into this that each card can provide you with a different strategy each time, I feel that there is a lot of replay-ability and it can potentially offer almost and endless supply of game play.

I my experience with Dominion I’ve found that it can help the way players play other games. For example I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering, in which there is a format called limited - this means that players play with a limited card pool and try to make the best deck they can. Essentially that’s what Dominion is; a big limited environment. So for all of you TCG players out there that want to improve your limited game deck-builder's are a great way to do that, it definitely helped me.

The observant of you will notice that earlier I mentioned 8 different editions of Dominion, each of them brings something new to the table. The 3 main ones are the base sets which give you all you need to play a game of Dominion - money and victory point cards mainly - and the other 5 give you a change of mechanics and theme: Seaside’s theme revolves around taking over islands and mainly focuses on your next turn (Duration Cards will effect your current and following turn as well as provide other effects), Nocturne follows more of a night-time shenanigans/dark goings-on in theme with card types like Hex, Doom and Spirit. There is a lot of variety when it comes to Dominion expansions, each one has a unique side and they all offer a slight shift on the gameplay.

Dominion is a game that offers players variance and freedom, and if there’s something I’ve learned in my years of gaming it’s this: despite how well crafted an experience is if you let players male there own choices and govern themselves they will feel much more satisfied with their gaming endeavor.

Head down to your local game store for a look at Dominion and maybe even a demo. It’s one of my favourite games and I’m sure you will all have as much fun with it as I have.

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