In case you’ve never heard of it, Dominion is a deck building card game. You start with 5 cards in your hand, with always the same 10 card deck (7 ‘1 copper’ to buy things, 3 ‘estate’ for starting victory points) and then you cycle through your deck purchasing communal cards that go into your discard. You begin with 1 action and 1 buy every turn but cards you play can add additional actions or buys. Play continues until one of the categories of victory point cards is gone, add up whatever victory points players have acquired in their decks and the one with the most the winner.
Since there are a wide variety of kinds of communal cards that do a wide range of things and they’re different every time every game is different and no strategy works every time.
Anyway, late to the party as always, I discovered the free online version a fan made.
I highly recommend it, I’ve never been great at the game, but the computer has managed to curb stomp me every game so far.
I just discovered it myself a few months ago, and after sitting in for two games with friends, found myself pretty taken with the game.
I recently got my hot little hands on my own (basic set, there are numerous expansions), but didn’t have anyone to play it with. Over the holidays I introduced it to my brother’s family – literally “introduced,” not “played,” as we only got in a few trial rounds before previously scheduled events forced us to quit. Later I persuaded my wife to try two-player (just us).
Everybody liked it. The next time I saw my brother’s family the first thing they asked was, “did you bring Dominion?” and then they fell to talking about it with my wife.
I find myself bemused, as this sort of thing (“complicated” board/card games) has previously been seen as my esoteric hobby.
It scored well on Boardgamegeek’s rankings too – at one point it had displaced Puerto Rico as the #1 game, although these days it’s hovering around 15-18 in the rankings.
My understanding is that the online site you linked to, Goko, is actually an “official” site which is just now coming online, replacing two fan sites people have been using (Isotropic and Brettspielwelt.) From what I’ve read, Goko is supposed to be free for the basic game, but one player will need to pay some sort of fee to use any cards from the expansions in a given game.
Thanks Sailboat, I’ll look into it, initially I didn’t care for it because I felt it was too much like multi-player solitaire, but certain combinations of cards in the base game can add quite a bit of player interaction and the expansion Intrigue really allows for a lot of it.
But all that is really moot for me with a computer version that has AI.
I have played on this site, but not lately. It is blocked here at work so I can’t check to see if anything has changed, but it allowed you to play with either the basic set or the intrigue expansion, and up to 4 players. It was free to play, but you could subscribe to get some special things, like the ability to see player rankings. They also have several other games available.
I play pretty regularly on http://dominion.isotropic.org, the unofficial site. It’s linked to http://councilroom.com/, which offers far more data than anybody could ever use on play statistics. For example, I perform significantly better than my average with apprentice or horse traders available, but I suck with Mandarin and Moneylender.
I think the site is scheduled to be taken offline with the launch of goko.com, but the failied initial launch of goko seems to have postponed that for some time.
After becoming curious about which site would be better to start online play, I realized the aforementioned Dominion Strategy Wiki has articles on Isotropic and Goko that might shed some light on their differences and status.
Regular Wikipedia has an article on Brettspielwelt (which I apparently misspelled) as well.
**Tracyfish **and I play on Isotropic pretty regularly. The only expansion I don’t have is the most recent one, Dark Ages. Anyone want to get together for a game or five?
Dominion had a very interesting interest curve for me… I played it and was instantly hooked, and got very interested in it, and then after a fairly small number of games my interest plummeted and now I actively dislike it.
Why? Two main reasons:
(1) Attack cards. It’s very weird the way the game is MOSTLY a solitaire game to race to do best, with a bit of resource scarcity, but with an optional-and-sometimes-entirely-absent bit of direct interference. For some reason, and one would have to delve deeply into my psychology as a game player to really understand this, the fact that the attacks are something that someone has to CHOOSE to do just leads to extreme bad feeling for me. I mean, there are plenty of games of all sorts in which the objective of the game is to attack your opponent in one way or another and interfere with what they’re doing. And I play those just fine and don’t get pissy about it. But the fact that attacking in Dominion is a CHOICE just makes it feel, somehow, mean. And (although you wouldn’t gather that from this post) I’m not in general someone who wants to introduce house rules and ban certain forms of within-the-rules play.
In addition to the general bad feeling from choosing to attack, the attack cards (at least the ones I remember playing with, I think I only played with the first two or so expansions) are ones that not just reduce your opponents’ score or something, but actively hinder the fun they’re trying to have. That is, to me, the fun of Dominion is setting up cool sets of things to do and getting excited about the more and more powerful things you’re going to get to do as you see if your strategy is working out properly. When someone is stopping you from doing that, it’s just taking the fun out of it entirely.
(2) I was playing a game of Dominion once with a really expert player, someone who is one of the beta testers for new expansions, etc. And there were some interesting cards I hadn’t played with before, so I wanted to try them out. So I bought some of them. He bought NONE of them, and just played some very boring seeming strategy involving buying lots of victory points. And he destroyed all of us (not surprisingly). A game shouldn’t tease you by providing fun and interesting things to do when in fact the correct strategy is NOT to do them.
I think it’s a good “gateway” board game (to more advanced stuff beyond stuff like Monopoly or Sorry!") but I just haven’t had the interest to play more than 5-10 games of it. It’s just too much solitaire with not enough player interaction. I actually started with the Intrigue set (supposedly designed specifically to fix this complaint) and even then was somewhat bored with the lack of player interaction.
It probably doesn’t help that 1) the Action cards slow down gameplay since everyone needs to constantly read them and remember what they do, and 2) an easy strong strategy is simply to buy the biggest gold or victory point card you can, and ignore action cards. Makes for a very boring game when all you do is buy greens and golds with the occasional action card.
Base game question: is there any reason for a player not to play a Chapel strategy when the card is available? If not, shouldn’t this card cost a lot more?
Well, although I’m no expert, it seems to me that your problem #1 solves your problem #2: the best way to stop someone’s boring “Big Money” strategy is to use attack cards against him. Even if the supply contains defense cards (like Moat), he has to clog up his “just cash and victory points” deck to get them. Assuming one or more attack cards are available in the supply, you can (usually) force a player out of a “Big Money” strategy entirely, or defeat him outright.
But will I enjoy doing so? Doesn’t sound like it to me, which is my point.
My main game is Magic: The Gathering, and one thing Magic has done a great job of improving over the years (I’ve been playing since 1995) is making it so that the fun things that people want to do are more and more likely to also be successful strategies. Back when I started playing, big creatures were a joke. But people love big creatures and want use angels and dragons and so forth. Now big creatures are WAY better than they used to be and a lot of the less interactive more stifling strategies have been de-emphasized or un-powered.
I used to play a lot on isotropic, but did eventually get bored with the game, largely because it did indeed become boring.
The diversity of the cards can also be a problem, however, since a single card can overwhelm a game. At a recent limited draft, for example, someone got Sands of Delirium and just mowed through everyone. It was dumb.
If this weren’t so clearly a total hijack, I would be very curious to hear some more details about this, as (a) Sands of Delirium isn’t even close to the most oppressive limited bomb printed in recent years, and (b) with only one copy of a card in your deck, you just plain can’t draw it every game.
My wife and I have played it a fair amount, but we only play against each other.
Is there an optimal set of cards to use for the two-player game? I pretty much find that when my wife and I play, if I focus mainly on getting cash together, I can kind of buy the points cards pretty heavily and I end up winning about 75% of the time.
I have yet to see what happens if we both go for cash. Kind of dull, I guess.
What would be the best strategy against the “cash grab” strategy? In a two-player game, I mean.
The strategy you’re both describing is called “Big Money,” it’s effective, and it’s available in every game, regardless of what kingdom cards are drawn, because it relies on money and victory cards. That said, most “engine” strategies beat it most of the time.
At the risk of spoilering play for some people, and/or overanalyzing what should be fun, here’s an article showing how and why, complete with plotted curves.
More simply, a good basic “engine” deck would have +actions, +cards, some “trashing” mechanism, and some +coins.
I actively prefer to randomly draw the kingdom cards so iut varies each time. That said, here are some suggested sets to play (although not aimed explicitly at two-player).
Dominion was created by a M:TG player and inspired by the deck-building principle.
Sailboat, I think you’re not giving Big Money enough credit by saying that “most “engine” strategies beat it most of the time.” It depends on the kingdom. It depends on whether you consider terminal draw (Big Money plus one or two +cards actions) or other simple strategies an engine. What you describe (+action, +cards, trashing) is an ideal engine, but random kingdom’s don’t always have that. It’s certainly more viable than a dysfunctional engine, which I’ve created more than once.
The groundwork for a good game starts with identifying the strategy you’ll use from turn 1. If there is little or no card synergy in the kingdom, Big Money or Big Money and one or two actions may be the best strategy. Most kingdoms will have something better than that option. I don’t know if I’d call all of them an “engine.” Big Money +laboratories is effective, but hardly an engine. On the other hand, nothing is as brutally efficient as an engine firing on all cylinders (e.g. Masquerade, Goons, King’s Court).
Mahaloth, there’s no uniform counter to Big Money. Virtually any kingdom can beat it, the trick is to determine how to do it with those particular cards. If you know you’re up against Big Money, a simple Smithy or Jack of all Trades will win most of the time. Dominion is a race. Big money is walking. One action is jogging - faster but safe. Engines are a sprint, but you sometimes trip over your own feet.
I have an app on my phone called “Dominion Shuffle” that will randomly select ten cards. You can set parameters if you want to ensure a mix of costs or if you don’t want to use a particular set.