Dominion Review
by Erik Guerra
From the back of the box: "You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner."
"But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn't be proud, but your grandparents would be delighted."
- For 2 to 4 players.
- Ages 8 to adult.
- 30 minute play time.
Contents: 500 cards: 130 Treasure cards, 48 Victory Cards, 252 Kingdom cards, 30 Curse cards, 33 placeholder cards, 7blank cards. 1 Rulebook.
Rio Grande Games' Dominion is a dynamic, easy to play, innovative combination of civilization building battles for supremacy in mid evil strategy board games and collectible card game mechanics. First off, Dominion is NOT a collectible card game. There are expansions planned, one of which - Intrigue - is on the shelves now but everything you need to play is in the box. But the fundamentals of deck building and drawing & playing cards from that deck is what makes Dominion different from any other civilization game.
Players begin the game with identical decks of just a few cards: money and victory points. Available to all players is a selection of other cards that provide various boons or benefits to the player that purchases them, so long as they can afford them. Every turn players draw cards, which at first will simply either be money or victory points. Then they purchase any of the available cards they can afford, and that card along with their hand go to their discard pile, then they draw five more cards. By the time a player goes to draw a new hand of five cards, and there are less then five cards in their deck, they shuffle their discard pile and it becomes their deck, and this is where your investments in those cards you purchased come into play. You now have a chance to draw them, and play and use their affects to either boost your economy, your actions for the turn, hurt the other players, any number of things!
The object of the game ultimately is to be the player with the most victory points in their deck by the end of the game. The challenge is that purchasing of those victory point cards is a double edged sword, because while they are all that matters in scoring at the end of the game, they do nothing but take up space in your deck over the course of game play! And when the challenge of the game is to build a more efficient, productive deck then your opponents, deck space is a precious commodity.
Dominion is a VERY innovative game. The appeal of a traditional economic civilization board game, in the fast paced format of a CCG. The 252 kingdom cards contain 10 each of 24 action cards. The action cards are those cards you purchase to construct your deck every turn. But since you only play with only a few of the 24 different types of action cards in any given game, the combination of available action cards is astounding, promising a different experience every time you play! The box is big for what you might expect for a card based game, but that's with good reason as it is well designed to keep all the different types of cards separated and easy to find.
Dominion is a great purchase for empire building strategy game enthusiasts as well as players of any CCG that enjoy the challenge of deck construction and making the most of their custom creation to pilot themselves to victory.
Have Fun,
Erik Guerra