Here are my tentative thoughts on the deck-building game Dominion after about 30 games, all face-to-face, 2-4 players, and, due to the holidays, mostly against experienced players from various parts of the US. As a result, I've been exposed to different play styles and a bit less group-think, I believe, than if I'd learned the game with just a local group.
So far, I'm enjoying Dominion quite a bit. It feels innovative, though it reminds me of tuning dynasty decks for Legends of the Five Rings. In that CCG, players had two different decks, one for actions while the dynasty deck was primarily (ignoring events) all about efficiency and growth; getting the "mostest", the fastest. That's Dominion in a nutshell.
Your deck starts with seven Copper (each worth 1) and three Estates (each 1 victory point). Your goal is to end with the most VPs, typically by buying more of the limited supply of Provinces (6 VPs each) than anyone else. Provinces cost 8 and you draw only five cards each turn (after discarding all unused cards from the previous turn), so one approach is to buy Silver (cost 3, worth 2) and Gold (cost 6, worth 3) cards, so that your draw of five cards will hopefully include eight or more money (since everything you buy, spend, and discard gets reshuffled together whenever you need more cards).
In addition to draw five and buy one card each turn; there's also one action, where you play and resolve a Kingdom card that you previously bought and have now drawn as one of your five cards. Each game has 10 stacks of different Kingdom cards on offer (out of 25 different kinds in the game), in addition to the treasure and victory cards.
Some Kingdom cards, such as Smithy or Moat, let you draw more cards, increasing the odds that you will draw eight or more money in one turn. Buy too many of these cards, instead of silver and gold, and you may just clog up your hand with unusable action cards. More expensive versions of these cards, such as the Laboratory, provide both card draws and another action, allowing you to play several of them as a "chain" of actions to both draw cards and avoid this "clogging" problem.
Other Kingdom cards, such as Chapel or Moneylender, let you "trash" a card, discarding it from the game instead of to your personal discard pile. These cards allow you to prune your deck of your initial coppers and estates, giving you a lean, "dense" deck of just silver, gold, and Provinces that rapidly recycles, often buying a Province a turn. Cards like Mine, Remodel, or Feast let you upgrade a card you trash, also resulting in dense, though not smaller, decks.
To counter these "draw more" or "slim down/upgrade and draw better" strategies, some Kingdom cards, such as the Witch, Bureaucrat, or Thief, allow you to clog up your opponent's decks with -1 VP Curse cards, or force opponents to redraw a victory card on their next turn (remember that victory cards are good only at the end of the game; before then, they just clog up decks), or to trash or even steal opponents' treasure cards.
The effects of attack cards on an opponent can be blocked if he or she reveals a Moat card in hand (assuming Moats are in the game, were bought, and drawn) and these cards -- like all Kingdom cards -- have an opportunity cost (you could have bought a treasure card for your deck instead). Thieves can also be partially blocked by buying Kingdom cards, such as the Woodcutter or Market, that provide money when resolved, but which aren't treasure cards that can be lost.
Some cards, such as the Village and Festival, provide two actions, allowing players to play multiple Kingdom cards. With several of these cards chaining off each other, you can potentially build a "Rube Goldberg" machine with lots of actions, card draws, and other effects, sometimes drawing your entire deck (and therefore all your treasure) and getting multiple buys, allowing you to possibly buy several victory cards at once. When this works, you're a genius; but if you draw your randomly shuffled cards in the wrong order, you might be looking at a bunch of mostly unusable cards that don't buy very much... Dominion is all about overall deck efficiency in the face of random shuffling and your opponent's actions.
One criticism I've heard is that too many cards are just variations on each other, at different costs. Of the 25 kinds of Kingdom cards, seven provide card draws in various ways; six either slim or upgrade your deck; five are attacks; three provide improved buying power; three give multiple actions; and one is another victory card.
This oversimplifies matters a bit, as a third of the cards, particularly the attack cards, really do two things. The Witch, in addition to clogging opponents' hands with curses, gives two card draws; the Bureaucrat produces a Silver for your next turn as well as possibly clogging up your opponents' hands; the Festival provides both multiple actions and improved buying power; and so on.
That said, many cards are variations on each other. However, in a some cases, a seemingly minor variation can produce an entire strategy, as well as being tactically interesting. Remodel is a good example. Remodel decks use lots of Remodel cards to produce an upgrade progression of Estate->Remodel->Gold->Province, while a single Remodel card can be bought in the early game to upgrade Estates or Copper or in the late game to provide a final Gold->Province upgrade (once your deck gets too diluted by victory cards to reliably buy a Province outright). Unfortunately, only a few Kingdom cards appear to be this versatile (but my relative lack of experience may be showing here).
Another criticism I've read is that Kingdom cards are dominated by treasure cards -- why buy a Kingdom card instead of a Silver? I don't agree with this. Having a high opportunity cost is a feature, not a bug, in my opinion. Therein lies much of the game. True, many Kingdom cards are only somewhat better than buying a Silver -- and often worse depending on circumstances -- but this makes for tough decisions. Decks with a few well-chosen Kingdom cards tend to consistently beat decks with just treasure cards, even though a deck stuffed with Kingdom cards will often die under its own weight.
Some say that after your initial buys, your strategy is mostly set and the game becomes mostly tedious shuffling and obvious, almost automatic decisions. I think there's some, but not a lot, of truth to this. Certainly, there are some "pure" deck types, such as Workshop-Garden, Remodel, or a straight-forward Chapel deck, where I feel my midgame actions are pretty much pre-programmed.
But even in these cases, there are some interesting decisions: How do you react when other players start buying Gardens? What do you buy with your Workshops when all the Gardens are gone? How soon do you start remodeling Remodel cards into Gold? If you keep drawing your Chapel with your good treasures and not your cruft, do you buy a second Chapel? When do you stop buying Gold and start buying Duchies (cost 5, 3 VPs), if you draw six or seven money (not eight for a Province)? As your deck starts getting diluted with more victory cards, should you buy a card drawing power or more treasure cards?
The tough decisions in Dominion are not when your deck is working, they are when your deck isn't quite working: What do you buy with five, not six, money during the early mid-game? What do you buy with seven, not eight, money during the late midgame? What, if anything, do you buy with a terrible draw? How do you respond to your opponents' having good luck? Do you buy an attack card? Which one? When? (An early Thief often helps your opponents by removing Copper from their decks; a late Thief may be too slow to affect them.) How do you respond when an opponent starts buying attack cards? What do you do in the end game when your deck gets diluted with victory cards?
I first played Dominion last year in prototype form at the Gathering of Friends. I played twice, seeing only a sample starting set of cards. With just this limited experience, I wondered if players should be getting some card besides coppers and estates in their opening hands, to speed up the first few turns. Now that I've seen and played the published game, I think the developers did a fine job. What I am most impressed by is how well Dominion plays with 10 randomly dealt (out of 25) stacks of Kingdom cards. It is truly amazing to me and I do hope the expansions are able to retain this property (even as the variance in card setup distributions increases with more Kingdom cards).
My one real criticism of the game as published is with its final turn, where the game ends immediately once the last Province is bought or if three stacks are empty due to buys. I do think the first player does have a real advantage, not only in getting more turns on average, but also in typically getting attacks off earlier (if the first player buys an attack card) and typically being hit by attacks later during the crucial early going. I don't believe that the later players being able to see what the first player chooses to buy compensates for these advantages among reasonably experienced players.
I understand what the designer is trying to do by having the winner go last in the next game and I can see how this scheme can work for a fixed group playing successive games. However, Dominion, in my experience, is often played as one of several games at once, with players rotating in and out of Dominion as other games end and start.
Our house rule is to determine the first player randomly and play, if the game ends on Province cards running out, with equal turns and "ghost" Provinces being available for players' final turns (using the blank cards to mark them); ties being a victory for the last tied player (in turn order). If a player ends the game by exhausting three (non-Province) stacks, then the game ends immediately (as ending the game that way often costs the player ending it victory points), with ties still going to the last tied player. So far, this seems much more satisfactory than the published rules (we're keeping track of how often it makes a difference).
My long-term concern is that Dominion's overall strategy space seems a bit sparse, with draw more, slim down/upgrade and draw better, interfere with opponents, and exploit multiple actions being the four major types of decks, plus a few specialized decks such as Workshop-Garden or Remodel. For now, as of 30 games, I'm still enjoying exploring this strategy space and trying to improve my play. We'll see if this lasts. For me, the big question is whether Dominion's expansions will contain mostly variations on what we've already seen, or completely new features, or more "dual-use" cards, like Remodel, that lead to new deck types while still working with existing decks. Enjoy!
Last edited on 2009-01-12 18:54:59 CST (Total Number of Edits: 4)
Posted Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:02 am
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