A lot of praise has been heaped on Dominion, and not without just cause; it is an excellent game, but so far, very little information about the game play has been available. This should help alleviate that.

Dominion is a card game where each player starts with the same basic Deck of 10 Cards -- 3 single Victory Point Cards (Estates), and 7 single Treasure Cards (Copper) and tries to end the game with the most Victory Point Cards in their Deck. Fairly simple and straightforward.

Before playing, you setup the stacks of Victory Point Cards and Treasure Cards. There are 3 types of Treasure Cards: Copper (worth 1 coin, cost 0 coin to purchase), Silver (worth 2 coin, cost 3 coin to purchase), and Gold (worth 3 coin, cost 6 coin to purchase) Cards, and there are enough of all that you rarely, if ever, run out of them (the exact number is likely set, but I hesitate to give it as it has a slight possibility of changing). There are also 3 types of Victory Point Cards: Estates (1 Victory Point, cost 2 coin to purchase), Duchies (3 Victory Points, cost 5 coin to purchase), and Provinces (6 Victory Points, cost 8 coin to purchase). The number of these used varies based on number of players, though the three stacks are always equal to one another.

I will explain how purchasing works a bit later...

Then players then select the Action Cards to be used in the game. There are several ways to do this outlined in the rules, everything from playing with a pre-set selection, to randomly picking the cards used. The game comes with a number of Action Cards (right now, that number is going to be around 24-25), and there are 10 copies of each Card. You select 10 to be in the game, and set aside the others for use in a later game. All of the Action cards in the base game cost from 2 to 6 coins to purchase.

Now you are ready to choose a start player and begin. Each player draws a hand of 5 Cards from his Deck of 10 Cards, and then on a player's turn they do the following things, in order:

1. Play an Action Card from your Hand into your Play Area and do what it says.
2. Purchase a Card (an Action Card, a Treasure Card, or a Victory Point Card) by playing Treasure Cards from your Hand into your Play Area.
3. Place any remaining Cards in your Hand and all Cards from your Play Area in your Discard Pile
4. Draw Cards from your Deck to fill your Hand to 5 Cards (shuffle your Discard Pile as needed, which will be a lot )

Each player takes their turn in order, and the game ends immediately when any 3 stacks are depleted, or when the stack of Province Victory Point Cards is depleted. Players then calculate their Victory Points by looking through their deck and adding up the Victory Point cards, most Victory Points wins. The game can take as little as 20 minutes or so with 4 experienced players, though the average is probably closer to 30 minutes, and the time is variable based not only on the players and strategies, but also on the particular Action Cards in use in a given game.

So what is all the fuss about?

Well, it can be hard to explain, and I really feel it takes a few plays to see the how great the game is. The tough part of the game is making it so that on every turn you have a high probability of doing something (ideally, more than 1 something) useful. You want to play an Action Card that helps you and/or hinders your opponents, and you want to buy a valuable Card that moves you closer to victory. Early on that will probably mean Treasure Cards and Action Cards, while later on you will shift your focus to Victory Points. See, you need to buy Victory Points so that you can actually win, but buying those tends to clog your Deck up and make it harder to have that high probability of doing useful stuff, so you tend to buy them later rather than sooner. But not always.

So, what it basically boils down to is a game with all those Holy Grail of Gaming characteristics that get thrown about whenever we end up talking about Eurogames: competing goals, lots of choices, not enough actions to do everything you want, fast-playing, low downtime, multiple paths to victory, subtle depth, easy to learn, tense decisions, high replayability. Yeah, it has all that. And a bag of chips, too.

I know there are a lot of details I am leaving out, especially about what the various Action Cards do, (EDIT: More on the Action Cards here)and well, that's just the way it has to be while the game is still in development and testing. I hope this answers a lot of lingering questions about gameplay, at the very least.

Woohoo, thanks for the details! Much appreciated.

Great intro!

I just missed something here:


You shuffle your discard pile back into your deck?

Sorry, there was a parenthesis missing. I have edited it to be a bit more clear, but here is a further clarification: If the draw pile runs out, shuffle your discard pile and it becomes your new draw pile. If you have to draw during your turn (due to an action card) and the draw pile is depleted, do not add the cards from the play area before shuffling the discards.

Is that clearer?

Now I got it, thank's

Nice review. I don't know how I'll manage those couple of months where I won't be able to play it. Mmmmmm... Euro-crack....

I appreciate the information David, can you be a bit more specific on the kinds of things that the action cards do?

You say that you want to play them to help yourself or hurt the others, does this imply that the game can have a direct conflict aspect? Indirect conflict ala Puerto Rico?

There are cards that specifically hurt the other players. They always hit everyone but you; it's not "take that." So for example you can steal treasure cards from the other players.

Woohoo! I can't tell you how dull this particular hammer has become over in the Race for the Galaxy forums. Glad to see we'll get a brand new one with which to bludgeon those who think they can grok any game on their first try..

Michael, is it possible that you went the full 3 days at Great Lakes Games last year and didn't manage to play this with us? How can that be?

Dale

I would like to ask the game author (Donald X) and the developers (Dale Yu, Valerie Putman) to carefully think about the cards size, in the point of view of the sleeves available in the market and it's prices.

It's 500 cards, so a not-very-popular format might be stressful for some gamers, because the sleeves for it might be expensive (like Yu-gi-oh formats) or it could be something in the middle, without the right sized sleeves for it, having a little of the card coming out on the top or too much free space on the sides. Nowadays this is a major issue for me with my games.

So, my suggestion would be Magic sized cards. Sleeves of this size are cheap to spend 500 on this game (you don't want to spend more in sleeves than in the game itself, do you?)

Thanks for your attention.

Well, I agree that it would be nice if it were easy to sleeve the cards. And who knows, maybe it will be. Easy to sleeve them, that is.

But that's not our call. If you have a problem with the rules, or think a certain card combination is too powerful, you can come to us. For issues concerning the components, the person you want is Jay Tummelson. I have no idea what his stance on sleeving is. Val & Dale impressed upon him the importance of high quality cards so that they can withstand shuffling, and my understanding is that the cards will be satisfyingly high quality. We can mention to him that sleeving might be an issue, but ultimately it's up to him. He can print the game on gingerbread if he wants. He wouldn't even have to ask me what kind of icing to use for the text.

It's just as well, because he knows about this stuff, and I sure don't. There are several things at once that it would be nice to have here - for the game to be as cheap as possible, for the cards to last as long as possible when shuffled without sleeves, and for the cards to be sleeve-able. It may or may not be possible to have it all. Maybe the perfect cards for sleeving wear out faster without sleeves, or cost a lot more. I have no idea what percentage of the people who buy the game will know about sleeves and decide they want to sleeve the cards. I don't know how much people will pay for a game with 500 cards and no plastic camels. For that matter this may have been decided long ago, so that changing the card stock would delay the game, and well that might be fine by you but might not be great for others.

So anyway, not my department.

Probably because no one dragged me into it, that seems to be how I end up playing most of the new games there

Dale - You were probably playing too much Agricola - if I recall...