Dominion: A general review or A history of the best game in the world and a sort of farewell
Disclaimer: The board game Dominion is not an ordinary game to me. It's one of my longest obsessions to date and this is not a "review" - it's more of a place for me to ramble on about this wonderful world of a game without having to direct my "recommendation" anywhere in particular.
First: The starkest beauty with this game is that within the space of Dominion, there is room for such a surprising amount of different "subgames" if you will. The basic rules, as I hope you are aware of already, are very simple. You are each turn able to play a card from your deck (via your hand of five cards) and buy a new card to your deck from the kingdom and the object is to make your deck as efficient as possible in reaching a state that will win the game - what that state is may change from game to game, but regardless of specifics, it's always about amassing victory points in some form.
The kingdom is where the beauty, and the complexity, is to be found because this kingdom area consists of 10 different kingdom cards and their function is to change and mix up the basic rules in order so your deck can move forward in various ways. The cards will allow you to play more cards from your hand in a given turn, grow your hand size, give you more purchasing power or allow you to buy or gain more cards in a single turn and so forth. Different good stuff simply put. Sometimes the cards comes with different draw backs you as a player have to be ready to adjust your strategy for, sometimes they simply are more expensive in order to be more powerful.
The kicker is: There is no upper limit to how many kingdom cards there can exist in Dominion as a whole and you may combine the 10 cards of the particular kingdom of a single game in whatever way you may see fit. This opens up the design space to the borders of infinity. I'm telling you, for long periods at the time I wasn't interested in board games really, I was interested in Dominion, it was enough since virtually every other game could be found within its scope. At least the feel of them. It always has fascinated me to bits, how a particular game of Dominion is played a certain way - a certain strategy is the winning one and certain cards is must- buys and so on, but then you switch a single card in the kingdom for your next game and everything may have changed entirely. Suddenly the previous strategy is no longer viable, another card has become a must buy and so on. It's not always a given that just one card changes the whole approach to the kingdom - but on the other hand, if you know which card to switch (e. g if you take out the only village in a kingdom to introduce the Witch instead) you can guarantee that two subsequent games will have a wholly different feel versus each other.
In official Dominion there are close to 500 different kingdom cards now (new expansions are on their way however, so an exact number will be irrelevant real soon) and the last calculation I saw on how many different possible games one imaginably could play was up in the sextiljons! Naturally all of those games won't be feeling all too different to each other, but I would still claim that most of them will. The nuance coming forth in the variations of the "card archetypes" of the game (such as Village, Smithy, Laboratory et cetera, the cards you'll find in the base game more or less) is perhaps easy to miss at first glance playing the game but after you have been pushing out a few tens of thousands plays of the game (yes, it's very possible to reach that staggeringly amount of games. I think every Dominion player still around online since the isotropic days may be close to 100 000' worth of games if we're counting all various platforms the game has existed on) you'll start to see how much potential strategy there is in each and every variation of a certain archetype. Dominion is a true "eternity game", if you were to be put on a cosmic island where you would be fed and sheltered through eternity you would be able to play the game endlessly without getting bored. I'm serious here, there is no end in sight to what this game has to offer.
And I haven't even mentioned landscape cards yet.
*
Here I would like to change gear and run through a short "history of Dominion" with you all. The game was released in 2008 and already at the very start the designer of the game - Donald X Vaccarino (DXV) - had created all the cards up to the expansion of Dark Ages. This means the following expansions shouldn't really be seen as "sequels" to the game but further "unveilings" of a rather massive game. Compare to a film trilogy like Lord of the rings where all the three parts belong together and even was created as a whole versus sequels that gets produced as a result of an unexpected success of the original movie. In the latter case there is a huge risk that the sequels will be distinctively worse than the original or at least have a very different atmosphere than what the original brought forward. Dominion up to Dark Ages is like "Lord of the Rings" in this regard. Everything belongs together and even if the game naturally gets more complex the huger it becomes every aspect up to that point has been thought of as a complete game and it shows in my opinion. The seven expansions up to Dark Ages are in my mind not really "expansions" (since they often feel like the board game version of "sequels") but just the game proper. DXV also created the small expansion Guilds - after the release of the Base game - it's however not really relevant neither or here or there for the story I'm telling, but it's got to be mentioned properly so people more knowledgeable than me on this subject won't curse me to oblivion..
After Dark Ages (and Guilds) it wasn't sure what would happen with Dominion going forward. DXV claims nowadays he never said he would stop doing expansions, but for some reason most people had that impression. Dominion was now finished, it was done. Maybe for the best too, sure, it was always possible to crank out new cards - the forums for fan cards did what they could to show this point - but how good were they going to be in the end? Allow Lord of the rings to be what it is -"Lord of the rings 2" sounds like a thing of utter nightmares..
*
Then, in 2015, it unexpectedly arrived. Dominion: Adventures! I remember that I was so happy I just screamed out the news to some fellow enthusiasts. I thought it was over with fawning over brand new cards every so often, I really did, so the arrival of Adventures - the first truly proper "sequel- expansion" to Dominion (Guilds was a small expansion, however one would like to categorize it in the end) was incredibly exciting.
When it comes to kingdom cards Adventures is a solid expansion, this text is not so focused on the review aspect after all, but it is something else entirely that makes Adventures a certain mile stone in the "history of Dominion", namely the introduction of Events. Events is a type of card-shaped things that now primarily is called "landscape cards" - they don't come in sets of 10 or 12 and is not included in the 10 cards of the ordinary kingdom. Instead they are placed sideways along the kingdom and can never be a card in your ordinary deck. This introduction was mind blowing to me. Already the first few games I felt like Dominion had gotten a completely new dimension to explore and that feeling was very much correct. Suddenly there was so much new design space that DXV could crank out expansions at the same pace as in the old days. And the expansions were good! New landscape-types were introduced almost with every expansion (and those who didn't still got "card-shaped things" in other forms) and whatever one thought of the new kingdom cards that came along with them, the landscape types were always highly interesting and introduced changes and twists to the game that indeed were welcome even if they in a sense were part of a "new game" in relation to "Dominion Dark Ages and Prior". "LotR 2" might be a nightmare but "Dominion II" was quite good considering the risks that came with it.
**
All the possible games including landscape- cards I would guess are nearly incalculable. The eternity aspect of the game became more eternier than one would have dared to imagine and in my opinion all this is good and well. Yes, the game now has a different feel than before the Adventures era, it shows in certain ways that every expansion by necessity is "tacked on" a previous existing structure but in return the game lives! As long as DXV is an active game designer new cards will always be a possibility and tweaks and updates to previous expansions is a likelihood as long as the boxes continues to fly off the shelves of various game stores. This is great!
I, however, have decided to "throw in the towel". I don't know if that matters to anyone at all, but I will tell you why anyway. "Dominion II" is a great game and I will always be in awe of DXVs ability to invent new stuff for this particular space of existence, but Dominion II is not and can never be the game I got obsessed with and which was one of my closest friends in a young adulthood that wasn't very.. easy going.. at all times. Original Dominion is, as said, a cohesive unity, it can never grow and - most importantly - it can never lose any of its components. One of the decisions when it comes to Dominion II I can't agree with is the choice to kill off old cards in favor of new ones. I understand the choice but it breaks my heart that the cards I frecking grew old with no longer are available to play with in the same way as all the other, active, ones. In the physical world this choice is highly understandable since there is scarcity there. A box can only be so big and when you as a designer feel like you can better the expansion why shouldn't you try to do it? Replacements might be sad, but for the game to stay alive they are indeed necessary.
Online however, there is no scarcity! The old cards don't have to go in the bin and they should stay available also in the competitive card pool! Why not expand the available ban list rather than automatically place the old cards in that category? Bah, you say, they were duds or annoying to play with anyway - no one will miss them. Well, wrong and wrong - I am not Nemo -and in any case it doesn't matter. I loved most of the cards being done away with and if I ever had a forte in terms of playing competitively it might have been to utilize cards that were largely considered duds. Even when they didn't work it was fun to try strategies that hardly anyone cared to employ and when they did work the opponent often hardly understood what had happened. "Did I just get beaten by.. transmute? This just can't be!" Weak cards make the kingdoms more manageable yet forces you to get creative - that isn't the same as being a "dud" in my book.
There are other things as well, such as in my view non necessary rule changes (buy and gain is different things damnit!) the side effect of "too many cards" which means you won't see certain combinations as often anymore and just a general fatigue. I'm out, simply put. No one will miss me, surely, I was only ever a medium player considering how much time I spent on the game and I never really got a foothold in the community. (my young adulthood was what it was and online communities can be difficult for whatever reason). I still wish to say good bye properly.
*
Ah, well.
Please be aware I'm not here to argue neither here nor there. I'm genuinely happy that Dominion still is a living game that keeps exploring new ways to do things and I wish both DXV as all remaining competitive players all the best in the future. The decisions that has been made is still sound even if I happen to disagree with some of them and - this is important - Old Dominion is still available for me to play and enjoy within the bounds of my own collection and my own playing groups. There, Scout and Goons will never die and I can ignore any new strange rule changes as much as I may need to. It's only my competitive playing days that are over, not my love for Dominion as it actually is. I think everybody still is a winner at the end of things.
Take care, all dear Dominion fans and may the RGN- gods be kind to you each and everyone of you!
First: The starkest beauty with this game is that within the space of Dominion, there is room for such a surprising amount of different "subgames" if you will. The basic rules, as I hope you are aware of already, are very simple. You are each turn able to play a card from your deck (via your hand of five cards) and buy a new card to your deck from the kingdom and the object is to make your deck as efficient as possible in reaching a state that will win the game - what that state is may change from game to game, but regardless of specifics, it's always about amassing victory points in some form.
The kingdom is where the beauty, and the complexity, is to be found because this kingdom area consists of 10 different kingdom cards and their function is to change and mix up the basic rules in order so your deck can move forward in various ways. The cards will allow you to play more cards from your hand in a given turn, grow your hand size, give you more purchasing power or allow you to buy or gain more cards in a single turn and so forth. Different good stuff simply put. Sometimes the cards comes with different draw backs you as a player have to be ready to adjust your strategy for, sometimes they simply are more expensive in order to be more powerful.
The kicker is: There is no upper limit to how many kingdom cards there can exist in Dominion as a whole and you may combine the 10 cards of the particular kingdom of a single game in whatever way you may see fit. This opens up the design space to the borders of infinity. I'm telling you, for long periods at the time I wasn't interested in board games really, I was interested in Dominion, it was enough since virtually every other game could be found within its scope. At least the feel of them. It always has fascinated me to bits, how a particular game of Dominion is played a certain way - a certain strategy is the winning one and certain cards is must- buys and so on, but then you switch a single card in the kingdom for your next game and everything may have changed entirely. Suddenly the previous strategy is no longer viable, another card has become a must buy and so on. It's not always a given that just one card changes the whole approach to the kingdom - but on the other hand, if you know which card to switch (e. g if you take out the only village in a kingdom to introduce the Witch instead) you can guarantee that two subsequent games will have a wholly different feel versus each other.
In official Dominion there are close to 500 different kingdom cards now (new expansions are on their way however, so an exact number will be irrelevant real soon) and the last calculation I saw on how many different possible games one imaginably could play was up in the sextiljons! Naturally all of those games won't be feeling all too different to each other, but I would still claim that most of them will. The nuance coming forth in the variations of the "card archetypes" of the game (such as Village, Smithy, Laboratory et cetera, the cards you'll find in the base game more or less) is perhaps easy to miss at first glance playing the game but after you have been pushing out a few tens of thousands plays of the game (yes, it's very possible to reach that staggeringly amount of games. I think every Dominion player still around online since the isotropic days may be close to 100 000' worth of games if we're counting all various platforms the game has existed on) you'll start to see how much potential strategy there is in each and every variation of a certain archetype. Dominion is a true "eternity game", if you were to be put on a cosmic island where you would be fed and sheltered through eternity you would be able to play the game endlessly without getting bored. I'm serious here, there is no end in sight to what this game has to offer.
And I haven't even mentioned landscape cards yet.
*
Here I would like to change gear and run through a short "history of Dominion" with you all. The game was released in 2008 and already at the very start the designer of the game - Donald X Vaccarino (DXV) - had created all the cards up to the expansion of Dark Ages. This means the following expansions shouldn't really be seen as "sequels" to the game but further "unveilings" of a rather massive game. Compare to a film trilogy like Lord of the rings where all the three parts belong together and even was created as a whole versus sequels that gets produced as a result of an unexpected success of the original movie. In the latter case there is a huge risk that the sequels will be distinctively worse than the original or at least have a very different atmosphere than what the original brought forward. Dominion up to Dark Ages is like "Lord of the Rings" in this regard. Everything belongs together and even if the game naturally gets more complex the huger it becomes every aspect up to that point has been thought of as a complete game and it shows in my opinion. The seven expansions up to Dark Ages are in my mind not really "expansions" (since they often feel like the board game version of "sequels") but just the game proper. DXV also created the small expansion Guilds - after the release of the Base game - it's however not really relevant neither or here or there for the story I'm telling, but it's got to be mentioned properly so people more knowledgeable than me on this subject won't curse me to oblivion..
After Dark Ages (and Guilds) it wasn't sure what would happen with Dominion going forward. DXV claims nowadays he never said he would stop doing expansions, but for some reason most people had that impression. Dominion was now finished, it was done. Maybe for the best too, sure, it was always possible to crank out new cards - the forums for fan cards did what they could to show this point - but how good were they going to be in the end? Allow Lord of the rings to be what it is -"Lord of the rings 2" sounds like a thing of utter nightmares..
*
Then, in 2015, it unexpectedly arrived. Dominion: Adventures! I remember that I was so happy I just screamed out the news to some fellow enthusiasts. I thought it was over with fawning over brand new cards every so often, I really did, so the arrival of Adventures - the first truly proper "sequel- expansion" to Dominion (Guilds was a small expansion, however one would like to categorize it in the end) was incredibly exciting.
When it comes to kingdom cards Adventures is a solid expansion, this text is not so focused on the review aspect after all, but it is something else entirely that makes Adventures a certain mile stone in the "history of Dominion", namely the introduction of Events. Events is a type of card-shaped things that now primarily is called "landscape cards" - they don't come in sets of 10 or 12 and is not included in the 10 cards of the ordinary kingdom. Instead they are placed sideways along the kingdom and can never be a card in your ordinary deck. This introduction was mind blowing to me. Already the first few games I felt like Dominion had gotten a completely new dimension to explore and that feeling was very much correct. Suddenly there was so much new design space that DXV could crank out expansions at the same pace as in the old days. And the expansions were good! New landscape-types were introduced almost with every expansion (and those who didn't still got "card-shaped things" in other forms) and whatever one thought of the new kingdom cards that came along with them, the landscape types were always highly interesting and introduced changes and twists to the game that indeed were welcome even if they in a sense were part of a "new game" in relation to "Dominion Dark Ages and Prior". "LotR 2" might be a nightmare but "Dominion II" was quite good considering the risks that came with it.
**
All the possible games including landscape- cards I would guess are nearly incalculable. The eternity aspect of the game became more eternier than one would have dared to imagine and in my opinion all this is good and well. Yes, the game now has a different feel than before the Adventures era, it shows in certain ways that every expansion by necessity is "tacked on" a previous existing structure but in return the game lives! As long as DXV is an active game designer new cards will always be a possibility and tweaks and updates to previous expansions is a likelihood as long as the boxes continues to fly off the shelves of various game stores. This is great!
I, however, have decided to "throw in the towel". I don't know if that matters to anyone at all, but I will tell you why anyway. "Dominion II" is a great game and I will always be in awe of DXVs ability to invent new stuff for this particular space of existence, but Dominion II is not and can never be the game I got obsessed with and which was one of my closest friends in a young adulthood that wasn't very.. easy going.. at all times. Original Dominion is, as said, a cohesive unity, it can never grow and - most importantly - it can never lose any of its components. One of the decisions when it comes to Dominion II I can't agree with is the choice to kill off old cards in favor of new ones. I understand the choice but it breaks my heart that the cards I frecking grew old with no longer are available to play with in the same way as all the other, active, ones. In the physical world this choice is highly understandable since there is scarcity there. A box can only be so big and when you as a designer feel like you can better the expansion why shouldn't you try to do it? Replacements might be sad, but for the game to stay alive they are indeed necessary.
Online however, there is no scarcity! The old cards don't have to go in the bin and they should stay available also in the competitive card pool! Why not expand the available ban list rather than automatically place the old cards in that category? Bah, you say, they were duds or annoying to play with anyway - no one will miss them. Well, wrong and wrong - I am not Nemo -and in any case it doesn't matter. I loved most of the cards being done away with and if I ever had a forte in terms of playing competitively it might have been to utilize cards that were largely considered duds. Even when they didn't work it was fun to try strategies that hardly anyone cared to employ and when they did work the opponent often hardly understood what had happened. "Did I just get beaten by.. transmute? This just can't be!" Weak cards make the kingdoms more manageable yet forces you to get creative - that isn't the same as being a "dud" in my book.
There are other things as well, such as in my view non necessary rule changes (buy and gain is different things damnit!) the side effect of "too many cards" which means you won't see certain combinations as often anymore and just a general fatigue. I'm out, simply put. No one will miss me, surely, I was only ever a medium player considering how much time I spent on the game and I never really got a foothold in the community. (my young adulthood was what it was and online communities can be difficult for whatever reason). I still wish to say good bye properly.
*
Ah, well.
Please be aware I'm not here to argue neither here nor there. I'm genuinely happy that Dominion still is a living game that keeps exploring new ways to do things and I wish both DXV as all remaining competitive players all the best in the future. The decisions that has been made is still sound even if I happen to disagree with some of them and - this is important - Old Dominion is still available for me to play and enjoy within the bounds of my own collection and my own playing groups. There, Scout and Goons will never die and I can ignore any new strange rule changes as much as I may need to. It's only my competitive playing days that are over, not my love for Dominion as it actually is. I think everybody still is a winner at the end of things.
Take care, all dear Dominion fans and may the RGN- gods be kind to you each and everyone of you!
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