A review of Dominion, 4000 plays later (2012)

I disagree about Chapel's cost. A 5 cost Chapel would lead to extraordinarily unbalanced games where a good starting hand basically sets you up to win.

Having the cost be 2 means that everyone gets access to it in the first two hands with out there being much swingy-ness in terms of the initial shuffle.

Maybe an argument could be made for 3 or 4 in the sense that everyone would still have access to it, but 5 just seems too high.

A good number of cards have been removed from the game

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Removed_cards

The article is from 2012.

I like that there's a couple of famous must cards. It makes kingdoms exciting it there's an occasional race to pick up lots of one card. I might ask to skip Minions if it's on the board twice in a row but it's one of my favorite cards. If there were more effective reaction cards, it might play a bit more dynamically.

If Chapel were nerfed, adding a condition where buying it caused that player to gain curses would be interesting. More so than increasing its cost.

Btw if you haven't played an all-star kingdom before, where you put 10 of the most famously powerful cards on the table at once, it's a hoot. Mining village, chapel, minions, harem, etc makes for a dynamic game.

> there is no form of errata/banning

I liked Isotropic's solution for this, which was to draft 12 cards for the board, and then each player vetoed one.

You could also set a ban list. IIRC just about everyone had Possession on theirs.

I remember setting up a reverse proxy so that the people in my call center (job at the time) could play each other on boring calls - as long as everyone was cool moves could take as long as you wanted.

I was really sad to see the new interface that it was shut down for was some flash monstrosity that was pay per-expansion pack, definitely killed my interest in playing it online.

> But later on as the other couple got more and more of the expansions,

I had the same experience for a different game. This is an annoying dynamic of playing board games (I guess with any group you play with frequently).

Damn those expansion couples!

Trying to read up about strategy online to keep up just kills the fun. Although I'm no expert on board gaming so take my word with a grain of salt.

You can’t cycle your deck multiple times per turn, iirc the discards don’t happen until after the turn ends.

Aside from that, it’s definitely not the only or best strategy. Buying gold early can usually edge it out, and it’s very vulnerable to curses.

Yes, except as beginners, you probably bought a lot more cards for your engine than you actually needed: at some point you’ll need to decide to start greening rather than buying actions. While blowout games are easy at first, optimization and learning the balance of money vs actions will start trimming turns off your games.

Another factor is that with experience, your opponent will either recognize what you’re doing and defend by buying the cards you’re wanting, or get their own engine going to beat you if they learn from their mistakes.

Most games are won by buying out the provinces, yes, but the three stacks win is there for a reason and is great for catching opponents off guard when the kingdom’s right.

The strategy comes in the race to achieve points before the game ends. It turns out that buying lots of cards and building a massive engine on a whim may not be more efficient than just buying silvers/golds/provinces all the time. There are lots of subtleties in the timing of purchases, and determining ways to create a slightly more efficient machine than your opponent.

IMO it's an terrific 1-on-1 game where meaningful strategic and tactical decisions are made, but I find the game a lot more "fun" with three or four players (five players takes way too long)

I've only played a hundred or two games, but my answer is not really. You're in a race to get enough victory point cards before they poison your deck into impotence. An action combo uses more money and buys to get online than a handful of gold, and is more succecptible to be poisoned by green. Missing even one turn to a bad hand hurts a lot, in about half of my most recent games the winner was decided by turn order (they went first so they grabbed the last province on turn 14, when another player who only had 13 turns was ready to buy that province).

No. Engine decks are of course a lot more fun than big money decks, but they often are too slow to build and lose to them. You’ll learn that as you get better.

Most players start off playing big money too much, move into playing engines too much, and then move back toward simpler strategies more often.

Some boards don’t even really have a good engine available, usually for lack of +actions.

For a high-level answer to that question, see https://dominionstrategy.com/2013/01/21/the-five-fundamental... (by the same author as the original article). You won with an "Engine" deck type, which is common, but certainly not always optimal.

These engine build are certainly the most fun strategy. There are all these cards available so you want use them.

The baseline strategy however: Only buy province, gold, or silver. You might be surprised how strong it is. It is also boring if you play with friends though.

The correct strategy for a game is entirely dependent on the kingdom.

You can't cycle through your deck multiple times in a single turn (barring the existence of sifting cards which given this was your first game I assume not) so you were probably playing a rule wrong.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to build efficient full deck draw engines I will bet big money as a beginner that you took wayyyyyyy too long to build an execute your engine.

Our group played tonight for the first time too!

Not sure what you mean by cycled through your deck multiple times, but if you meant all in 1 turn, then you definitely didn't play correctly.

Any action cards that are played are put in the play area, and aren't moved into the discard pile until the Cleanup phase. Also, the Buy phase only starts after the Action phase has ended. ABC (Action, Buy, Cleanup).

Once you've drawn your entire deck and need to draw more, then the discard pile is shuffled to form a new deck. Once that's drawn too you'll be left with an empty deck, no discard pile, and the rest of the cards left in either your hand or playing area.

Did you win when you did that? The strategy varies quite a lot between instances of the game, but often I find that those kinds of “engines” happen too late in the game to really be valuable, and by then someone might have bought gold and provinces.

There's a bit of variation, even in the base game.

Generally in boardgaming "tactical" is used to refer to moment-to-moment/turn-to-turn decision making, reacting to the immediate situation. I don't see how that applies here, you can't decide on a draw/action strategy at the start of the game and then decide as you go which cards you're going to use for it. I guess you can, but it seems like a bad idea.

To be successful you'd need to start by studying the card offer and seeing if draw/action strategy is possible and advisable. To do that you need to understand all the possible ways to build an engine(if any) from the available cards and how they might interact with other cards that are available. That seems like strategy to me.

> Nobody else around the table is going to know the game better than him, and hence, there really isn't much sport in bringing your Dominion box out and suggesting we play. This reviewer is perfectly proud of the fact that a newbie doesn't stand a chance against a veteran player.

That's basically true for any game where there's a wide range of possible skill levels. The question is -- how much fun is it, as a beginner, to play against an expert, knowing that you're probably not going to win?

Most games like this (chess, Starcraft, etc), it's not fun at all: the core strategy is to damage your opponent's ability to play and execute their strategy.

Losing in Dominion isn't nearly so bad. A beginner can look at the cards, form a strategy, and see their deck beginning to start to work (or see that it doesn't work) before the game ends. That means you can still try things and have a sense of satisfaction, even if you end up losing.

If you're the competitive type who can't have fun if you're not going to win, then sure, playing someone at a much higher skill level isn't going to work. But lots of people don't mind losing if the process isn't crushing / humiliating like chess, and in those situations, Dominion is a pretty good game. I know a couple where the husband is really into board games, and the wife thinks games are kind of fun but not super-serious; Dominion is one of their go-to games, because he can minmax to his hearts content while still making it fun for her.

Agreed, this and the other similar comment. This is not a game where being new invites an interesting game, if the other players are uninviting.

I remember one board game gathering where they played Dominion, including a younger player, but I bowed out from playing. There was one particular player in that group who was boisterous and loud, and could name every combo as they were setting up. After a while we could all tell he was winning, mostly from his loud exclamations. Eventually he did win and bragged about it so badly, the younger player left with his family with his head down. I felt bad because I knew that the game, from that initial jerk player, would not end well.

This is why I admire the game Dominion from afar, but will rarely ever play.

I feel any party game that also intends to have mechanics prone to skill imbalances needs some built in, playtested method of handicapping. I don't mind playing (say) Super Smash with a total pro when we can easily agree that they have less lives than me, a newb, for example.

You could make a rule that the more experienced player has to start with a handicap. That's fairly standard in Chess when an experienced player wants to play against a much weaker opponent.

The more victory cards ("green") you buy, generally the less effective your deck becomes (because most victory cards don't do anything other than count for points). This means that buying VPs makes it (generally) harder to buy more VPs. The smaller your deck, the more pronounced this effect.

All of this taken together means that you end up having to target some point along the continuum between "get points quickly but fizzle out early" and "long slow burn to getting a lot of points." If you go for the "quick" strategy but the game doesn't end quickly, your opponent can take the extra time to pass you in VP, and vice versa if you choose the "slow" strategy but the game is short. And it's not just two options — like I said, there's a whole spectrum of choice.

333c's answer is excellent. The other consideration is that "the required victory points" aren't fixed; they are 1 + your opponent's VP.

Some boards do have a dynamic of "there are roughly X VP we are fighting over; get more than half in the fewest turns". On other boards, if someone were to green too early, they would hopelessly clog up their decks. So players build for as long as possible and gain VP only on the same turn as they can end the game.

There's a wide spectrum between these extremes.

This sounds more like a culture fit problem (Mensa seems ALL ABOUT being Smartest????) then a problem with board games at large. Perhaps try playing games while drinking/drugs; this adds the random variety and tends to filter out the hardcore minmaxers