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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Dominion lets you spend all the time making decisions rather than waiting for other people by having hardly any interaction between players; at times it can feel like a time trial race. I tend to prefer Tanto Cuore; while it's largely a direct rip-off (and the art puts some people off) it gives you more attack options, and the balance shifts to allow a wider variety of strategies (Dominion I find duchies are almost entirely irrelevant, and anything other than going for the high end rarely works). So it's an improvement, but it's so similar I suspect we're converging on the ultimate form of that kind of game.

I still need to try Agricola.

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The "flavor" of Dominion play is hugely dependent on the cards you're playing with. If you feel like there isn't enough interaction between players, I'd recommend giving Intrigue a try. Alchemy generally is a weak set, except for Posession, which is just a completely miserable damn card to have in game for the amount that players can use it to mess with eachother.

Prosperity also brings an entirely new way to win to the game: through tokens, which you can accumulate quickly by buying things like Duchies for cheap and then trashing them as quickly as possible.

We have a few house rules that allow us to "tune" each game before it starts, and we've had a huge variety of games as a result: everything from 15-minute time trials like you describe, to Dominion "golf" (most negative points wins!), to hour-long slug fests that leave me wanting to flip the table in aggravation.

(edit: I've done my fair share of aggravating others though too -- ended up abusing a village-king's court-torturer combo badly enough at one game night that torturer was pretty much forever after banned; the same night a different table got me back with a consistent militia-masquerade 1-2 punch that left me flopping around in the game like a fish out of water. Anyway, there are all kinds of ways to play this game, so if you're finding it repetitive, you're probably missing something!)

I concur about Intrigue, but I don't mind the Alchemy set. During one game with the Familiar, my brother-in-law and I actually managed to deplete the Curse card supply.

We've been using the Prosperity, Alchemy, and Dark Ages expansions, and they really add a lot of depth and enjoyment to the game. We use the Platinum treasure cards and Colony victory cards from Prosperity in each game, which can speed up the game and change how it plays. Maybe the game was designed to prevent players from "topping out" by limiting how much treasure or victory they can buy in a turn, but we don't like feeling limited.

Our house rule is we can't play with more than 1 stack of "+2 action" cards, because most of us will just buy those and combo them with "+ draw" cards, which give us "+ action" cards, eventually allowing the entire deck to be drawn, and ~30 victory points gained each turn.

For an interesting variation on this idea, try Quarriors -- it's like Dominion but with dice, with some faces being treasure/currency, and other faces being the creature/attack spell.

Maybe check out Puzzle Strike? David Sirlin claims to have sidestepped several of the problems Dominion has (slightly nsfw pic at beginning):

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/11/28/puzzle-strike-and-domi...

Well not having played dominion I can only vouch for Sirlin's Puzzle Strike. Another plus it is very easy to play. My girlfriend gave it to me as a present and my little brothers learned to play just after watching us play a couple of times. Plus the mechanics are solid, they keep the game from having a clear winner and then just having to wait for it (I'm watching you, Monopoly). They updated the rules recently with the new expansion but I haven't played the new version yet so I can't comment on the improvement. But it is definetly a blast for 4 players.

His other game Flash duel is also really good. It tries to capture a fighting game (a la street fighter II) with the board game. It succeds in the zoning part imho.

I am personally a fan of another of his games not mentioned here, Yomi. It definitely puts focus in a 1-on-1, competitive aspect where you're not playing time trial and every action you make involves picking the counter to the action your opponent is going to make.

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