F&*$ Dominion

Dominion

Plot:  The plot is very much arbitrary; you are a medieval noble trying to build the best barony or something.

Goal:  It’s a game about victory points.   VP’s are purchased with money like anything else in the game, but they go into to the deck you are building.  And most VP cards don’t do anything, so the more VP’s you have the worse the deck performs.

Mechanics:  Each player starts the game with identical decks of 10 cards, 7 copper and 3 estates.  Coppers are worth 1$ towards buys and estates are worth 1 VP and don’t do jack.  A turn starts with drawing 5 cards, and then 3 phases occur.

Action Phase:  A player starts with 1 action.  An action is playing an ‘action’ styled card, helpfully color coded white, which has a certain effect on the game.   A white card may…

Give more actions

Give more buys (see buy phase)

Give more money

Give more cards

Alter cards previously acquired in your deck

Affect other players (attack cards)

Or, and usually, some combination of above.

Reaction:  if during an opponent’s action phase he plays an ‘attack’ card, if you have a ‘defense’ card (helpfully color coded blue) in your hand you may reveal that card and not suffer the consequences of that attack.

Buy phase:  A player starts with one buy, which can be altered by the action phase.  Hopefully when you drew cards or finished up the action phase you got money (coin type cards are helpfully color coded gold).  Use that money to buy something.  You can buy more action cards, more money or more VPs (VP type cards are helpfully color coded green).

Cleanup phase:  Sweep the cards played and any leftover in your hand and start a face up discard pile.  Draw 5 new cards.

Any time that the draw pile is exhausted, shuffle in the discards.

Game ends when the Province VP stack is exhausted (6 VP costs 8$) is exhausted OR any 3 other stacks have been exhausted.

  

Tactics:   the basic theme is to make your deck as efficient as possible.  There are multiple ways to do this, but the two most common ways are to build a card drawing engine (I call this the cascade), or to dispose of or promote inferior cards, usually copper and estates (I don’t have a fancy term for this.)  Card disposal is really under rated by the beginning player, but a lot of games turn on who does the best job of removing the inefficient cards from the deck.   The most powerful attacks are the ones that add inefficiency to the deck.

Review:  This is a solid game with good replay.  Fortunately and unfortunately BrettspielWelt’s online implementation is really, really good and easy to understand.  Fortunately because I can’t say that about most of BSW’s offerings, and unfortunately because I played Online Dominion a lot.  The instant play means that I could play like 5 games an hour, which is cool, except that I learned what I thought I could learn from this game fairly rapidly and lost interest after a month or two.   There are expansions but the later ones drastically change the game like expansions tend to do.  Initial review was 9/10, but since I explored so many of the nuances…currently 5/10.

Tips:

*Chapel is the best disposal card.  If a game features chapels, buy one quick, and immediately trash your estates and look for opportunities to upgrade coins so you can trash your copper.

*Nobles are the best cascade card.  Nobles count as 2 VP towards winning, AND give you either +2 actions or +3 cards.  Nobles are their own cascade.

*Extra buys can be important, but are rarely necessary.  The goal is to get to 8$ for a province, very rarely in any deck construction will you get $16 and 2 buys.