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."

This description doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with the game, its merely the ‘theme’ that is tacked upon the game.  Not a bad thing or theme, but still tacked on.  What Dominion is REALLY is essentially a CCG without the card collecting. This is a game that centers about the deck building that you find in popular CCG such as the Magic:The Gathering (the grand daddy of them all).  Now you might wonder, how can a game about deck building be fun? What I am going to do in this review is answer that as its one of my favourite games in my collection!

 

 

The theme of Dominion has been loosely tacked upon the game (as stated above). The theme is medival/mythical deck building (there are witches after all).  It could been themed as anything, but this is approachable, relatable and fun.

 

 

The goal of Dominion is to construct a deck, that at game end, is worth the most victory points. During the course of the game you ‘buy’ cards to add to your deck, some are worth victory points, others provide you actions or options. The game is really about finding the balance between these two things.

 

 

So what do you get in the box? A WHOLE WACK OF CARDS. That is it. Yup. A ton of cards, 500 in fact! 

500 Cards:

130 Basic Treasure Cards:

60 "Copper" Cards

40 "Silver" Cards

30 "Gold" Cards

48 Basic Victory Cards:

24 "Estate" Cards

12 "Duchy" Cards

12 "Province" Cards

252 Kingdom Cards:

240 Kingdom Action Cards (10 x 24 Each)

12 Kingdom Victory Cards (12 x 1 "Gardens")

30 Curse Cards

33 Placeholder Cards

7 Blank Cards

Storage Tray

Rulebook

 

Each card has a nice finish with adequate artwork. Nothing to really right home about, but the text of each card is readable and easy to understand.  I highly recommend picking up some sleaves to increase the life span of your cards.

 

Its actually a rather large box for only 500 cards, but why size? Its due to the most useful storage tray that I have ever received from a box! Unlike FFG (fantasy flight games) whom are notorious for ‘coffin boxes’, Dominions insert is a think of art and beauty! Combined with a labelling insert that you can download (and all new versions of the game come with), all your cards will be neatly stowed away for easy access after each game. This makes for quick set up and take down between rounds. Believe me, its one of the things that they really did right with this game! 

 

 

Dominion centers around deck building. It’s a game about card drafting and hand management. Each hand tends to play itself (in most cases), its just a matter of making the optimal choice each turn and selecting the right ratio of cards to have in your deck.

 

 

So how does this game work? I keep saying ‘it’s a game about deck building’, so here is how you go about building your deck :) 

 

Each players turn is divided into 3 phases:

1) Action Phase – play an action or attack card

2) Buy Phase – buy and add cards to your deck

3) Clean Up Phase – discard the remainder of the cards un-played from your hand as with those played and draw 5 more

 

Simple enough right?

 

Each game of dominion starts with selecting at random 10 community cards known as Kingdom cads, each having a set of 10 each (8 in two player games). The base game of Dominion comes with 25 sets of these Kingdom cards which really are the heart of the game.  You only ever play with 10 of these cards in any given game. The game provides a nice set of special cards (one of each) to use at the beginning of each game to allow you to randomly shuffle and draw the subset of 10 (of the 25) cards to play with each game, just another nice touch!  

 

Think about this though, that is 25 pick 10 cards. That is 3268760 combinations! Crazy huh? Talk about replay-ability!

 

There are two other types of cards, Treasure and Victory. Treasure cards is the games money in denominations of copper (valued at 1 coin), silver (valued at 2 coins) and gold (valued at 3 coins). Victory cards are represented as pieces of ‘land’; Estate (1 victory point), Duchy (3 victory points) and Province (6 victory points).

 

 

Each player begins the game with the same starting deck of 7 copper cards and 3 estate cards. Thus your first two turns (of 5 card hands), will be a split between the 7 copper you start with.  Whenever you run out of cards to draw, simply reshuffle your discard pile to form a new deck to draw from. Trust me, you will be doing a lot of reshuffling in this game. I recommend that after a player completes the first two phases of the turn, move onto the next while that player cleans up (and shuffles) his deck (if need be).

 

In phase 1, the Action phase, you can play any 1 action card that you have available in your hand. One card at a time? When I have 5? That seems silly, but wait! There is more! Many of the Kingdom cards are +X action cards! So if you play a +2 action Kingdom card, you now can play another two cards from your hand! Neat huh? Each of the kingdom cards have some sort of benefit such as +X Actions, +X Buy actions, + Coins, some allow you to trade for more expensive cards, some allow you to ‘attack’ other players to affect their game play and others allow you to draw more cards.

 

The second phase is the Buy phase. If you haven’t figured it out already, this is the point where you can buy more Treasure, Victory or Kingdom cards to expand your deck. Each card in Dominion has a different coin cost, the most expensive of which is the province card at 8.  Most Kingdom cards range from 2 to 6 in value.  When you buy a card, it goes right into your discard pile to be shuffled into your deck when your current one depletes (don’t worry, you burn through your deck fast!).  Now what do you Buy cards with? Why your Treasure cards of course! You play your Treasure cards at this point to increase your coin amount for that turn. An important strategy in any game of Dominion is to enhance the Treasure cards available to you in your deck. As you are only ever drawing 5 cards a turn (+ whatever you draw from played Kingdom cards), the higher the value Treasure cards that you draw the better.

 

The magic numbers in Dominion I find are 5 and 8. 5 to buy the ‘really’ good Kingdom cards and 8 to buy provinces, the best Victory card. If you ever draw a hand where you get to 8 coin, BUY A PROVINCE. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS BUY A PROVINCE! 

 

The final phase of Dominion is the Clean up phase. At this point you discard all that you have played, all cards that are unplayed in your hand (like victory cards) and then draw another 5 new cards from your deck (reshuffling if you run out).

 

The game ends on one of two conditions: 

1) 3 stacks of Victory, Treasure or Kingdom cards are depleted

2) All the Province cards have been purchased

 

The key to Dominion is finding good combinations of Kingdom cards and balancing that with the number of victory cards that you buy. Often during a game, someone will flood their deck with useless cards or too many Victory cards early and this will really stall their deck for late game. Its important that your deck grows in a balanced manner.  As you buy more of any one card, you change the balance of your deck, you changes the odds of certain cards being drawn and drawn together (to get combos).  This is the real challenge in Dominion.

 

 

 

This game is very simple. Play and buy cards, shuffle up and play and buy some more. What is really enjoyable about this game is learning and figuring out what cards work well together and in what situation.  I strongly recommend NOT reading any strategies about Dominion. This will really ruin the game as half the fun is discovering what works well together and experimenting!

 

The only thing that I will say about Dominion is that there is one card that is exceptionally broken, the Chapel. If used in what is know as a ‘Chapel Deck’, its is exceedingly difficult to defeat that player. The Chapel allows you to discard up to 4 cards from your hand. You might wonder why this would be a problem? Think of it this way, on your first few turns your discard your 3 dead estate cards and excess copper. Now every hand your are either drawing 4 or 5 copper. Buy some silver and discard some more copper. Buy some gold with that silver and discard the rest of your copper and silver. Now with that much gold in your hand along with a few good Kingdom cards, you can rush off to buy all the Province cards w/o a single person having a chance at winning.  Its just too powerful for what it is.

 

The only other issue with Dominion is that the game favours the first player seat. That is why they suggest playing ‘rounds’ of Dominion, rotating this position from game to game.

 

This game has extremely high replay-ability. You will find yourself coming back again and again as each game is different with a different set of 10 cards. Get bored of the base game? Buy one of the two expansions to switch things up!

 

 

3/3 For Rules and Game play

2/3 For quality of components (still seems a bit pricey for what you get, but still well worth it due to high replayability)

4/4 For Fun Factor and Replayability

 

That is a solid 9/10. I want to give it a 10, but its still just a box of cards. I have problems with that :)

 

 

This is a must buy. Simply a great game that is exceptionally approachable, easy to learn and plays fast. In one night of gaming will get through a half dozen games, which is good since we never have more than a couple of hours to game at any given time.  It might seem pricey for a box of cards, but they have been exceptionally well play tested and will provide countless hours of fun!