Dominion is a 2 to 4 players in which the main mechanic is deck building.

You read that right, this game is more about the deck of cards you end up with than the cards you play in the game. I find it a very original approach which will no doubt be copied in the future by other games.

It’s a medium/light game that takes about 30 minutes of play, very simple to grasp and with a good amount of choices. It’s one of my favorite “filler” games already and I’m always ready to play it.

The objective of this game is to end up with the most victory points in your deck, seeing as those victory serve no purpose on the deck while actually playing, there is a balance to be maintained between cards you can play and cards that will ultimately make you win.

So how do you build your deck? Well, everyone starts with a 10 card deck composed of 7 Copper cards and 3 Estate cards. Copper cards allow you to buy other cards, from other treasure cards (Silver and Gold) to Victory point cards to Kingdom cards. The Estate cards basically give you 1 Victory point each in the end of the game.

In the table there will be available 3 stacks of victory point cards, 3 stacks of treasure cards, 10 stacks of 10 cards each of kingdom cards and 1 curse cards stack (which give you -1 victory points).

Victory point and curse stacks will vary in number of cards according to players.

Players will draw 5 cards from their deck at the beginning of the game. Game turns are divided in Action phase, Buy phase and cleanup phase.

In the Action phase you can play 1 action (which are the Kingdom cards basically with one exception), in the buy phase you may buy one card from the board into your deck and in the cleanup phase you put all your cards played and the cards in your hand into your discard pile.

Actions you play range from giving you extra actions, giving you more bonus coins, allowing you to buy more than one card, discard cards from other players, trashing cards from your deck (i.e. eliminating forever cards from your deck), etc. Actions cards you play must stay on the board until the cleanup phase.

When buying you must first calculate how much buys you have available and any bonus coins through the action cards played earlier, and then buy one card or more by placing your treasures in the table, the gained cards are put in your discard pile. As awkward as that seems, seeing that when you don’t have enough cards in your deck to draw you shuffle your discard pile to form your new deck, it all becomes clear.

In the cleanup phase you’ll discard the cards you’ve played this turn and the cards in your hand. This bit is also a bit confusing at first, as discarding your hand every turn isn’t very usual on other games, but it makes for faster turns and faster decisions, and usually you want to play everything in your hand anyway. At the end of this phase you draw 5 cards from your deck.

Each player plays his whole turn before the next player starts his, but there’s no problem in starting to play when the other player is still in the cleanup as it makes the game go faster.

The only time this shouldn’t be done is when the next player plays an Action - attack card, in that case the other player should execute cleanup first to avoid confusion as attack cards mess with other player’s hands and decks.

The game ends when the last of Province cards (the 6 Victory point cards) has been bought or when any 3 piles have been bought. Then you just need to take your deck, your hand and your discard pile and count your victory points.

In the box

In the box you’ll find besides the rulebook:

- 130 Treasure cards

- 48 Victory points cards

- 252 Kingdom cards

- 30 Curse cards

- 33 placeholder cards

- 7 blank cards

Now here is my main point of disliking in this game, the game is formed of 500 cards with a standard euro size (think Agricola sized cards) which means you’ll have a very hard time finding sleeves for these cards and you you do find them it’ll be a bit expensive. Yu-Gi-Oh sized sleeves are the ones which best fit these cards.

If you’re someone who doesn’t usually sleeve his cards and think this has nothing to do with you, I have to warn you, the card quality isn’t the best and everyone will be shuffling these cards very often so they will get worn and fast.

I wonder why they didn’t make this game with the card size of Race for the Galaxy (Magic card size) and the same quality, was it that much expensive? Probably not as expensive as having to buy all those sleeves…

Is this game for me?

If you like fast games with a good amount of decisions, then this is the game for you. It’s just as great with 2 to 4 people. Some people don’t like all that shuffling of cards or find it weird, I think it’s fun and will find it funnier once my cards are all sleeved.

How many times will I play this game?

This is one of those games that begs for another game and another and so on.

Final Score

I like this game a lot, it’s simple to explain, fast to play and has a very good amount of choices. Some will say that this game plays itself, but they fail to understand that the real objective of the game is to build a deck and that’s where the decisions are made not when playing cards from your hand.

The only flaw that irritates me in this game is the card quality, I could excuse it in other card games, but this game inherently makes you shuffle cards almost every turn it begs for a set of decently produced cards.

You can find Dominion on sale from $29.22 at the following spots:

Amazon, eBay and Funagain.

My thanks to various BGG users for the great photos in the article, if you’re the creator of any of these images and want to remove it from here please e-mail me.

Tags: 2-4 players, 9 stars, dominion, review, rio grande

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.