The Secret Lair

Of late, I’ve found myself enamored of the relatively new genre of non-collectible deck building card games. These tend to operate in a similar vein as collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, with two notable exceptions: 1. they aren’t hellish money-sinks, as everything you need to play competitively is in the game box you buy, as opposed to CCG’s where competitive players need to drop wads of cash to buy numerous booster packs in a quest to find rare and powerful cards, and 2. a core piece of gameplay is actually building your deck from a common pool of cards during the course of the game, whereas with CCG’s you start play with a deck you’ve customized from your personal card collection. Having had the opportunity to play several deck building games of late, and noting that even being non-collectible, they represent not an insignificant investment of money, I’ll be using my little corner of The Lair to comparatively look at a few of them more closely in the coming weeks.

If you aren’t familiar with how deck building games work, the basic concept is thus: each player starts with a small, identical deck of cards, and can only draw a few of these into their hand on each turn. There is a central pool of cards available to everyone, and players attempt to acquire cards from this pool to add into their deck. Each card has different special abilities and advantages when played, depending on the theme of the game – currency to buy other cards from the pool, a combat value to defeat enemy cards, the ability to draw more cards into your hand from your deck on a given turn, et cetera – and the core strategy is to build the most efficient, powerful deck of cards that work well together in order to satisfy the victory conditions¹ and WIN. On the scale of luck versus skill, this genre is all about strategizing in your choice of what cards to put into your deck in order to manage the luck of what you randomly draw into your hand and can use each turn.

The best known and most decorated game of this genre is, unquestionably, Dominion, and so that is what I will consider today. Also, because the word Dominion contains the word “minion”, and at The Secret Lair, we loves us some minions².

Vital statistics: Dominion is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. It handles 2-4 players, and claims to have a playing time of 30 minutes, although most sessions I’ve played tend to run a little longer. It is rated as suitable for ages 8 and up, which seems appropriate for understanding the game mechanics.

Theme and production: Dominion has an inoffensive medieval fantasy theme that focuses on evoking the flavor of a Renaissance Festival, and not on stabbing people in the face³, making it quite suitable for family play. Each player takes the role of a monarch who is in control of a small kingdom, with the ultimate goal of building your dominion to a larger extent than the other players. To this end, the cards that give you victory points are Estates, Duchies, and Provinces, representing the territory you are collecting.

The majority of cards in the game are kingdom cards, that are designed with typical medieval fantasy tropes, including people (such as a Chancellor or Witch), structures (the Moat or Throne Room are examples), or events (like a Feast or Festival). This gives sufficient flavor to the proceedings, although it’s important to note that most of the kingdom cards are similar in how they function in the game despite having seemingly disparate things represented on them; for example, the Adventurer and the Cellar kingdom cards are both Action cards that function in the same way, despite being an exciting person and a musty place, respectively. While this makes sense in the context of the rules, it is a slight disappointment from a thematic perspective.

The cards themselves are of reasonable quality and thin enough to be easily shuffled, but not excessively wear-resistant with numerous plays. The art ranges from merely okay to great, but is given less than half of the space on each card in order to make room for game information, which makes the illustrations seem less important – letting the art have more visual real estate would draw me in a bit more to the medieval-ness of the game. The box is surprisingly large, equaling that of many board games, but includes a plastic tray with numerous slots to keep the card types sorted for easy storage and play.

Gameplay: The game comes with 25 different types of kingdom cards, of which 10 types are chosen to be used in a given game, and form 10 individual stacks in the central play area. Most of the kingdom cards are Action cards and each kingdom card type has different abilities, which can include allowing the player to draw or play more cards during their turn, giving a currency bonus to buy new cards, upgrading or eliminating less powerful cards from the player’s hand, or other more specific effects. As the kingdom cards are not mixed together, during any given turn a player has the opportunity to acquire any of the 10 types available if they have the resources to do so. Additionally, a large number of currency cards (Copper, Silver, and Gold) and a more limited number of victory cards (the aforementioned Estates, Duchies, and Provinces) are available for all players to purchase from the central play area.

Each player starts with a deck of 10 cards of identical composition⁴, and draws 5 cards into their hand. Play proceeds with each player playing one action card from their hand and buying a card from the play area with currency from their hand per turn, and then discarding the remainder of their hand and all cards used during the turn into their personal discard pile. Any new cards acquired are also discarded. At the end of the turn, a player will draw 5 new cards, and when their deck runs out, they shuffle their personal discard pile to refill it. In this way, each player is continuously adding to their deck to allow them to do more and different things on subsequent turns.

Given that the majority of the kingdom cards affect only the person playing them, there is relatively little direct interaction between the players as the game progresses⁵. This means that most of interplay between players is in observing the strategies of others, tracking their success, and modifying your own strategy to compensate. The game ends when all of the Provinces⁶ have been purchased, or 3 of the 10 types of kingdom cards have been depleted from the central play area. The player with the most victory cards in their deck WINS. This brings up an important element of the game – victory cards have no other function beyond taking up space in your deck. This means that if you acquire too many victory cards too soon, the chances of them being drawn into your hand on each turn are higher… which means you have less of a chance of cards that will allow you to do things on your turn.

What works well: Gameplay is fast and enjoyable, with a strategic component that is deep and varied without being overly complex. Later in the game, being able to construct chains of actions during a single turn as a result of the interplay of the abilities of multiple cards is exceedingly fun. The numerous combinations possible from the 25 types of kingdom cards ensures a massive amount of replayability.

Not so much: Gameplay mechanics don’t fully embrace the fantasy medieval theme, which in turn doesn’t provide any face-stabbing. The art could have been been featured with slightly more prominence on the cards, which would have enhanced their attractiveness without impacting the clarity of the game information being presented.

Endgame: Dominion is simply a great game, especially if you are looking for something that’s straightforward to play while being strategically deep at the same time. It’s not excessively luck driven and has very little “screw the other player” dynamics, both of which are strong points for me. While I haven’t played with any of them, there are several boxed expansions out that provide new kingdom cards and rules to further enhance what is already a greatly replayable game⁷. The only thing that keeps me from coming back to Dominion more frequently than I already do is that the medieval theme is a bit boring in it’s implementation. Fortunately, there are other deck-building games that allow for a bit more excitement through face-stabbing, as well see next time.

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Rio Grande Games or anyone involved with the design or production of Dominion.]

1. Usually, getting the most victory points. [↩]
2. Some more than others. On second thought, the less we speak of that, the better. [↩]
3. Neither in the real-life sense, nor in the “screw your neighbor” gameplay sense, nor in the thematic combat sense. Much to my disappointment, at least with the latter. [↩]
4. 7 Coppers for buying power, and 3 Estates for a meager starting supply of victory points [↩]
5. A few kingdom cards, such as the Militia, do allow a player to affect the cards of other players – in this case, forcing another player to discard 2 cards from their hand. [↩]
6. The most expensive, and most valuable, victory point card. [↩]
7. I’ll ignore the fact that having multiple expansions to a non-collectible game is testing somewhat the concept of it being “non-collectible”. Yes, I know the “collectible” designation in CCG’s is about buying many packs of cards to collect rare and ultra-rare cards, but still. [↩]

Tags: Deck Building Game Review-A-Thon, deck building games, Dominion, Donald X. Vaccarino, John Cmar, Rio Grande Games

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 at 10:08 am and is filed under Games. 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.