RULES
The rules of Dominion are very simple. In fact, they are so simple, that it is confusing. An extreme example of rules being too simple would be, "Open the box. Play." Of course, the rules in Dominion aren't quite as minimalistic as that, but I do feel that a few clarifications in addition to the rules would go a long way in helping understand how the game plays.

Dominion is a card game with 500 cards, and they fall into one of 4 categories: action, treasure, victory, and curse cards which are really just negative victory cards.

Now, some of these are kingdom cards, and others are non-kingdom cards. All the treasure cards (Copper, Silver, and Gold) are non-kingdom cards. Curse cards are non-kingdom cards. Three victory cards (Estate, Duchy, and Province) are non-kingdom cards. The rest are kingdom cards, which include all the action cards, and one victory card (the Garden).

So why the classifications? Well, to set up the game, you put all the non-kingdom cards in their piles--these are always up for play no matter which setup you use. And then, you choose 10 kingdom cards (randomly, by choice, predetermined, whichever method you want) to use for that particular game.

The action cards are played during the action phase. The treasure cards are played during the buy phase. And the victory cards are counted at game's end.



There are 5 places your card can go to: the draw pile, your hand, the play area, the discard pile, and the trash pile. At the end of your turn, you put all the cards in the play area and those left unplayed in your hand into the discard pile. Yes, you discard all the cards in your hand, even if they are unplayed. You then draw 5 cards from the draw pile into your hand and wait for your next turn. When the draw pile reaches zero cards, reshuffle the discard pile to form a new draw pile. Cards in the trash pile are out of the game--they do not get reshuffled.

On your turn, it is as easy as ABC. You do, in order:
Action cards. On your turn you get one action, and each action card costs one action to play. You may play action card/s into the play area.
Buy cards. On your turn you get one buy, and you get to buy a card up to the number of coins you have this turn. Newly purchased cards are put in your discard pile.
Clean up. Discard and draw cards as explained above.

The game ends when any 3 piles are empty, or the Province pile is empty. At this point, players count out the victory points on their victory cards, and whoever has the most victory points wins. In case of a tie, the player who had fewer turns wins. If that is still a tie, then it is just a tie.

Now, a few clarifications are in order. The type of cards indicates when they are used. Action cards in the action phase, treasure cards in the buy phase, and victory cards at game's end. However, you can still draw victory cards during the game, and when you do, they do absolutely nothing except clog up your hand. When I first learned and played the game on BSW, I was totally confused by this. (Though the shitty implementation by BSW probably contributed to this.)

Also, when you play an action card that says +2 coins, that does not mean that you take 2 treasure cards into your hand. Rather, these are 2 virtual coins that you can spend this turn. Copper, Silver, and Gold give you respectively 1, 2, and 3 coins. These treasure cards are played during the buy phase to give you additional coins, and do not require an action to play.

Also, some action cards have +n actions on them, which allows you to play multiple action cards in one turn. Others have +n buys, which allows you to buy multiple cards in one turn. Yet others have +n cards, which lets you draw n cards from your draw pile into your hand.

NOT THE CONVENTIONAL CARD GAME
Another aspect I found confusing at first was the distinction between the discard and trash piles, and in particular the importance of the discard pile. When I buy a card, it goes into the discard pile? And I discard unplayed cards from my hand? What is up with that? The important concept to understand here is that Dominion is not just a game with card shuffling and drawing, it is a game about card shuffling and drawing.

In conventional card games, the challenge is in the playing of the cards that you draw (imagine that). You hold these in your hand, waiting for the right moment to play them. You have no control over the content of the draw pile, and the discard pile is merely an afterthought. In Dominion, it is the opposite: the challenge is in building your draw pile; the actual playing of what you draw is quite trivial. That is why your newly purchased cards go into the discard pile. That is also why your unplayed cards go into the discard pile. They go there to be reshuffled, because the focus is on the shuffling, the reshuffling, and the drawing of cards as you build them rather than the actual playing of them from your hand. Now, I find that to be at once the most brilliant and stupidest idea ever. It is so simple, that it is stupid. It is so simple, that it is brilliant. It is so simple, that I am sure I would have never thought of it.

Essentially, what we have here is a ground-breaking design: a deck that builds itself, a game where the shuffling and drawing of cards is the game. In summary, Dominion is a game where you draw from a deck that you are constantly modifying over and over and over again. The real test of skill is in how you modify your deck. Playing what you draw is the easy part. In fact, usually the better job you did at deck building, the less decisions you have to make when actually playing your cards. And when you do have interesting choices to be made when playing your cards, it is often, guess what, when you drew action cards that allow you to modify your deck (trash some card for another, etc).

So, what are some good ways we can build our decks?

Don't Clog It With VPs
The "normal" way of winning is to buy Provinces (6vp). They are very expensive (cost 8 coins), but they are valuable because they take up only one hand space. One Province is infinitely better than two Duchies (3vp each) because even though they are worth the same points, the two Duchies clog your deck more. So it is normally better to delay any VP purchase and build up a deck that can sustain a run for the needed number of Provinces, than to start buying cheaper VPs earlier.

The Trimmed Chapel Deck
There are two types of Dominion setups: those with the Chapel, and those without. The reason the Chapel has such a big effect is that it is the only practical way of having a "two-way street" when building your deck. Without it, your deck-building will be a "one-way street": once you add a card, you can't get rid of it. The Chapel allows you to buy a card that is good early game (Moneylender, Moat and Witch in a Witch game, etc), and then trash them later in mid or late game. It also allows you to trash the estate and copper cards that you start the game with, because these are nothing but hand cloggers (especially the estates, the copper you at least need to buy your first few cards).

With a trimmed Chapel deck, the smaller the deck the better. I'd rather have a deck of 3 gold than 3 gold and 5 copper, because the latter would reduce the number of coins I get per hand of 5 cards. The Chapel keeps your hand quality high by cleaning it of trash.

The Cycling Deck
The Laboratory, or the Village and Smithy, or the Festival and Council Room, or the Village and Witch/Moat, give +actions and +cards, so you can play them in combination to cycle through your deck, to increase your hand size from 5 to 10 or 20 (or whatever). With a larger hand size, you will have more coins to spend.

The Action Deck
Many action cards are "dead end" actions, because they don't have +action on them. It is useless to draw more than one of these on a turn, because you can only play one. However, if you have the Village or Festival which grants +2 actions, then you can Remodel/Adventurer/etc multiple times.

The Garden Deck
The Garden is the only kingdom victory card, and each Garden card gives you 1 point for every 10 cards in your deck. So if you end the game with 4 Gardens and 28 cards, that's worth 8 points. The trick with the Garden deck is that you sometimes want to buy cards just to increase your deck size. So buying Coppers and Estates can be a good idea. Cellars are useful because it will let you cycle through the many hand cloggers that you have. Workshops and cards that give +buys are also good because they let you get more than one card per turn.

NOT THE TYPICAL INTERACTION
One complaint Dominion gets is that there is no player interaction, and I agree. There really isn't much interaction in any meaningful sense. Sure when you play the Militia I must discard two cards from my hand, and when I play the Witch you must gain a Curse card, but I hardly consider that as interaction at all. It is more a case of the cards interacting, than the players interacting. The players build the decks, and let them interact with each other. Of course players may have to react to what the others are building. I may want to get Moats to defend against your Witches, etc. But again I find these types of deck interactions quite trivial 99% of the time.

To be more explicit, in most setups the only real decision is made at the start of the game. You scan the initial setup, and based on that determine what's the best deck to build (there is usually only one), and spend the rest of the game on auto-pilot building that deck.

However, it can get real interesting on the few occasions when you can get a rock-paper-scissor counter from the potential decks that can be built from a particular setup. The best example (that I am aware of) is setups with the Chapel and the Thief. Now, normally the fastest and most efficient way to rack up purchase power is with a trimmed Chapel deck, with a high concentration of Gold. However, the Thief counters this by stealing your few precious Golds. So what we have is players settling for a lower income deck, diluting the deck with Festivals for example. Festivals give one less coin than Gold, but they cannot be stolen because they are not treasure cards. (In case you didn' catch it, that's Gold countering Festival, Festival countering Thief, and Thief countering Gold.)

I won a game once because I got a Thief to counter my opponent's Chapel trimmed, Village Remodel deck to steal some of his Gold before he could Remodel them to Province. I had to pay real close attention to his deck to buy my Thief at the right time, the exact moment when his deck hits "stealable" status. Buying it too early and the Thief is just a useless hand clogger. By the way, for those who haven't played the game yet, I don't want to get your hopes too high regarding the Thief. 90% of the time they are just useless and just take up space in the setup. But in the proper setup, they can bring some really nice dynamics (the Interactive setup is not one of them).

Another good example of deck interaction is setups with Witches. In these games, the player who can give others more Curses than he receives will put himself in a strong position. Curse cards do two things. First, they are worth -1 point. Second, they clog up your hand. This is what I like to do: Chapel trim my deck to less than ten cards, buy one or two Witches (with help of Feast, Moneylender, or a Silver), buy a couple of Villages (+1 card, +2 actions), and start playing one or two Witches per turn. I start buying more Silver and Gold when the Curse cards are close to running out, but not before because they would dilute the rate at which I can curse my opponents. But, I tried this once against someone who completely skipped buying a Witch and went for early Labs instead. I was cursing him every turn, but with a Chapel trimmed Lab deck, he was able to cycle through and trash any Curse cards every turn. He beat me soundly. I don't remember if I had the Village though. If I had then some extra Curses early on may have prevented him from getting his engine going.

Another source of interaction is in the limited supply of each card. There are times when you want to buy an action card before it runs out, or just to deny them to your opponents. Laboratory are usually hotly contested. Villages can be too in setups that call for +2 action action cards (for example to be chained with the Smithy).

But the real interaction is in the timing of ending the game. This is really just a side effect of the end game condition. In fact, if the game ended after a predetermined number of turns there would be next to no interaction at all.

Consider a 2 player game where each player bought 3 Province (6vp) cards, and there are 2 Province cards left. Suppose player A also has 1 estate (1vp) card in his deck, and player B has nothing else. Now if on player B's turn he has 8 coins, should he buy the province? If he does, and player A is also able to buy a province on his next turn, the game would end and player A would win by 1 point. So player B instead chooses to buy a Duchy (3vp). Now the situation is reversed, and player A would also buy a Duchy instead also. But here's the catch, as they start to clog their hands with Duchies, their average coins per turn drops, and at some point they will no longer be able to afford Provinces. If you can switch back to buying Provinces instead of Duchies before you reach this point and your opponent doesn't, then you will win. It is very important then, to know at all times the purchasing power of you and your opponent. So ideally, you want to know your opponent's deck as well as he does. This requires that you pay very close attention to his deck throughout the game.

Now consider a 3 player game. If everyone is competent, then whoever gets 5 Provinces (out of 12) is in a very strong position to win. But if one of the players absolutely sucks, and we expect him to get only 1 or 2 Provinces, then suddenly I'd need ~7 Provinces to win. Now you may think what's the difference? The best deck for buying 5 Provinces faster than your opponent should also be the best deck for buying 7 Provinces faster than your opponent. But that is not the case. As your hand becomes clogged up with Province cards, your buying power drops. Some decks drop faster, some drop slower. More specifically, a deck that can sustain a run for 7 Provinces will need more Laboratories than a deck that can only sustain a run for 5 Provinces, but Laboratories run out fast in 3 player games, so you will need to decide early how long you need to sustain your run for. And you need to base this decision on what the other players' purchasing powers are.

The card that really adds to the timing aspect of the game is the Garden. The Garden strategy offers a drastically different income model, and if one or more player pursue it also the timing of the game end. Usually, the Garden decks want to end the game right when they reach 30 or 40 cards, and before the other players can start their full run for the Provinces. However, to end the game, they will need to deplete 3 piles, and if their income drops to as low as 1 or 2 coins per turn it may become impossible for them to do so. Witch games are good because you can count on the Curse cards being depleted. The Garden obviously will also be depleted. So you only need to deplete one other pile, probably the Estate. The Province player must judge how fast the Garden player can end the game, and adjust their run for Provinces/Duchies accordingly.

Of all the predetermined setups, I find the size distortion to be the most interactive. It has the Chapel-Thief dynamic, the Workshop-Garden strategy available, the Village-Witch and its potential Laboratory-Chapel counter. The presence of the Woodcutter also opens up for a long build up, uber high income model of double Province buys, which adds another layer to the timing aspect of the game.

The "interactive" and big money setups on the other hand are not interactive at all.

NOT THE SECOND COMING
Dominion has one ground breaking idea (a constantly reshuffled deck that builds itself), and it implements it well, but in a somewhat workman-like fashion. It's one of those compulsively playable games, where you sort of go on auto-pilot, like St. Petersburg, Settlers of Catan, etc. Coming up with a winning strategy takes experience, but the execution of the strategy is quite trivial. It's not terribly deep or strategical, and interaction is limited. But it's still fun (and compulsively playable) because it's fun to, well, build your little deck and see it play out, in a feel-good kind of way.

More specifically, the fun comes predominantly from learning the game and its different tricks, rather than the actual execution of said tricks. Depends on whether you like to experience all the intricacies and nuances of something like that. It's sometimes fun to see different dynamics play out, and learn new potentials of cards/combos you've never realized before. I like playing against very strong players, and see them pull off some creative tricks. The first time I saw the Labs in action, I thought this game was all about chaining your hand. The first time I saw the Chapel deck in action, it was very refreshing. And when I first saw someone buy a Garden at the start of the game, I thought he was stupid and boy was I surprised by how things turned out. I pulled a Garden deck victory on someone, and he said he wanted to try it on someone else. I've seen strong players use the Library and the Adventurer in ways I've never seen them used before. Once you've tried each trick out a couple of times though, it does get old.

Now if someone can use the Dominion concept, and make a game where not only the deck building part is challenging, but also the actual card playing, that may be a real winner for me.

Last minor note. The artwork is okay, and the production quality is good, but the cardback is very ugly. The game box is an excellent storage solution.




Oh and remember, if you really like this game, it's okay for you to have interest in deck building and card shuffling, and thus interest in Dominion. However, we should recognise that this just means that Dominion is to your taste, rather than being truly flawless.

Great review! I bought the box and played my first game today (after a couple of solo games to get the rules down) and it seems my feelings after that very limited experience mirror those you describe. I too thought "This is a cool mechanic. I wonder if you could make a *real* game with it."

But I'm sure I'll play this quite a few times.

I disagree on how good the box is for storage, though. In my mind the logical way to sort the kingdom cards is by cost, and there's no good way to divide them like that among the slots. (But I'm glad the slots are roomy enough that the cards fit with card sleeves on - with all the shuffling you do, I suspect they'd wear out right fast without them.)

I have no interest in deck building or card shuffling and I love this game. It is the strategy and tactics, the choices, the variety from game to game, and yes, the interactions of Dominion that draw me into it.

I certainly don't see the need to try to limit the appeal of this game to a select few. It's an excellent game and, if someone is hesitant to buy it, they should play it to see what they think. It grabbed me and the rest of my game group like no other game has in a long time.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/2743447#2743447

Thanks for the tip, and to PhilReed also.

So how do we know that a game is truly great? Or, looking at it another way, isn't it possible that a game might be truly great and not to your taste?

...my head just exploded.

Look at the link I posted.

We shall soon find out if this game has the type of fan boys that take any negative criticism as a personal affront, an attack on their manhood and clearly from a reviewer who has lost his marbles, is trolling and "if you don't like it, don't play it and tell us about it" crowd. Memoir '44 is a good example of this type of fan boy following. I wish you luck.

Indeed, it couldn't possibly be that people disagreed with concrete assertions in the review, e.g. that "the card play itself is idiotically simple", as if every turn it is idiotically obvious what the best purchase is. (So why are there numerous threads about strategy, if it's so idiotically obvious?) Or that "There's no waiting for the right moment, or reacting to your opponents status." (So you ignore whether your opponent has bought Thief or Witch, for instance? Knowing whether your opponent has more or few points than you has no bearing on whether you try to delay the game's end or bring it to a finish faster?)

Or that anyone might be offended by having the game compared to masturbating onto a biscuit and eating the biscuit?

You earned it.

Thanks for writing such a good review.

And my variant cards.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/2850103#2850103

Yes, this is the problem for a number of CCGs, but not all (e.g., I consider the gameplay of Middle Earth CCG and Netrunner more significant and enjoyable than the deckbuilding). Have you played any drafting variants of existing CCGs? I'm interested in the non-collectible new version of Call of Cthulhu CCG for this purpose.

But I've never seen a CCG draft variant that works the same as the recursive drafting of Dominion. They're usually some form of "big pile of cards, reveal them in small sets, draft sets until deck meets size criteria, play". But some games have a sideboard built in, where you can tune as you play, so that vaguely fits.

Anyway, good luck with this quest. You're not alone.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I've never played any CCGs. I'd like to try some, but I don't want to buy any or seriously get into it though.

That's what's cool about FFG's new LCG model (Living Card Game): none of that collecting crap. It's all fixed sets, you know what you're getting, and can buy expansions (or not) based on their particular merits. Think Blue Moon, not Magic: the Gathering.

Dominion was inspired by Magic: The Gathering CCG and makes a lot more sense to you if you are familiar with Magic. The current version of Dominion is kind of a stripped-down implementation of the idea, but if you know the history of Magic expansions you can see a clear path towards all kinds of elaborations with more strategy and more interactivity. Magic is a game system, and Dominion is a game system, and since any individual game is determined by the set of cards available, introducing new cards can radically change the game. The designer actually created seven expansions during playtesting, so there is a lot of room to grow.

Indeed, I am very curious as to what the expansions will bring. I wonder if they will revolutionize the game, or just be more of the same. As posted, I even created my own card ideas.