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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Despite having obsessed with it for a while, for casual players I wouldn't use Dominion. Its main downside is that serious play requires too much strategy, resulting in too much heads-down thinking about your hand and not enough interaction. I'd rather start people off with Carcassonne.

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Dominion’s problem as a beginners’ game is that an even somewhat experienced player has a huge edge over a complete novice: even a passing familiarity with the cards will open up strategic combinations. In addition, they’ll have a hunch for when in the game they need to start accumulating victory points rather than expanding their monetary assets. That said, I love the game, and I think that it’s fairly easy to get into it.

How is that ever avoided though? I can not imagine a game where any amount of experience is not an advantage, where the game also has sufficient depth to be interesting.

Good point: unless it’s completely random it’s never entirely avoidable — there’s an element of skill. And I still think that Dominion can be very fun with beginners (that’s my experience at least).

That said, there are games that level the playing field without yielding entirely to chance; such as Dixit, where advantages are rather gained from knowing the other players.

In games with higher interaction newbies can effectively gang up on the experienced leader. It has its issues, but it works.

I find Tanto Cuore makes a nice sweet spot - it's mostly as parallel as Dominion, but adds just enough interaction. Normally I'll get about 3/4 of the way through a game with newbies and then they'll go a couple of rounds of all buying me bad habits, and I'll smile because they've got it, and end up on a negative score.

Games can have strategic depth that is only mildly helpful in improving the odds of winning. Arguably Carcassonne is like this.

Casual players don't see that Dominion requires strategy. Probability calculations blow right past them and they dismiss it as a simple, boring game.

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