Games That Don't Suck: Dominion

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Dominion, the first recommendation in this series, is a quick card game with a medieval theme, but no overtly fantastic elements. There are no dragons or sparkly unicorns here (there is a Witch, but that's all). The players are land-owning nobility in an unspecified kingdom, trying to amass the largest number of valuable lands before the game ends. Lands are green cards that give a specified number of points (from 1 to 5) but have no other real value. One buys lands with money cards, which one acquires during the game by purchasing them with smaller money cards. (Buying money is one of Dominion's only counter-intuitive features.) The game also provides action cards, which allow players to increase their number of purchases per turn, draw new cards, discard less useful cards in their hand, or make life difficult for (i.e., attack) other players. Action cards are illustrated with and named after a person or place – a Village, a Throne Room, a Militia company – which sometimes relates to their game function and sometimes merely adds character to the game.

Dominion's central mechanic is called deck-building, which is not unique to this game, although it's one of the first non-collectible card games (as opposed to collectible card games, like It's Tragic, This Gathering) to do it well. Each player starts with a deck of ten fairly weak cards (Copper coins and 1-point Estates), from which s/he draws a hand of five cards. Each turn players play some or all of the cards from their hand, using the played cards to activate actions and buy new cards. They then discard any unused cards and draw five new cards from their deck. When they exhaust their individual decks, players shuffle their used cards together with anything they've purchased (action cards, new money cards, new lands) to form a new deck, from which they draw subsequent hands. Gradually the players build up larger decks - hence, "deck-building game" - with more action cards, more valuable money cards, and more valuable lands. The game ends when all of the most valuable land cards (Provinces) have been purchased, or when the players have bought all of three other kinds of cards (excluding money cards, which rarely run out). This takes anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes; experienced players can breeze through a couple of games in an hour.

This seems too simple to be fun, but Dominion has just enough randomness, a fair amount of strategy, and a lot of replay value.  The randomness comes from the reshuffling of each player's deck every time it runs out of cards.  The strategy derives from the five-card limit imposed on each player's hand every turn; players generally want either to limit their acquisitions of, or eliminate, less valuable cards, or buy action cards (like the Cellar) that let them discard useless cards. Players can play attack cards, forcing their adversaries to discard cards or give them to the attacker (among other possibilities). The game's high replay value stems from the large number of action cards available: 25 of them, of which only ten can be used in a given game. Some games will therefore have lots of attack cards and player conflict, some will require players to focus on building up their money supply, some will allow players to draw and play larger hands.

To sum up: Dominion is easy to learn, has only a few mildly counter-intuitive rules, can be played in under an hour, mixes a lot of luck with a fair amount of strategy, and is different every time you play it. What's not to like?

1.      This is not a game for those who despise medieval settings, though there are virtually no “fantasy” elements in the game, and the setting doesn't affect game play. (No one has to say “Huzzah!”)

2.      One can play the basic game with as few as two people, but only four at most can play.

3.      It's expensive: $45, as opposed to $20 for Monopoly. However, Dominion has more replay value than The Thing From Parker Brothers, and a lot less Associated Bitterness.

Finally, here, via Boardgamegeek.com, is a short account of a Dominion game I played a couple of years ago.

 (Thanks to Able Gamer First Class Susi Livingston for assistance with this piece.)

Addendum, 20 April 2016: CPO Gamer Ben McFarlane notes that land cards are actually worth 1-6 points (Provinces are 6-point cards). Much obliged for the clarification. And in my note on MTG I should have noted that Magic isn't a deck-building game. Indeed, it isn't a game at all. It is, in fact, an opioid.