I've played a lot more games than that and used to be one of the highest rated players on Isotropic and then on the current site. I don't know what this guy's talking about at some points. People were hammering duke/dutchies back in the isotropic game. I don't think anyone overlooked the kings court/goons/masquerade pin for one game, let alone thousands. It just doesn't come up much.
He leaves out my biggest criticism, there is no form of errata/banning. When an overpowered card enters the fray, you just have to play it. Minion's on the board? Guess we're just fighting for 'em.
Chapel should cost more than 2 no matter what Vaccarino says. Probably 5. Etc.
Vaccarino is a great game designer but I think the playtesting could be better sometimes, and unlike CCGs with developed tournament systems there's no changing a card once it's out there ever.
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.
There are lots of boards where a 5/2 split is a tremendous advantage. Chapel already contributes to that, as the article mentioned, because the player who got 4/3 really got 4/2. You get Chapel and a good 5 drop and your opponent with 4/2 can just go ahead and concede on turn one.
But making it 5 takes it out of the opening hand most of the time. That’s why most of the best cards are 5.
I’m not 100% sure it shouldn’t be 3 or 4 but it definitely shouldn’t be 2. And I’m fairly sure that if it trashed 3 cards instead of 4 it would still be extremely playable (given how many times good players take worse trashing than that in the first round) and that the play testers back then just didn’t know the game well enough yet to understand.
>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.
It already has that. If you draw 2 coppers in your first hand (and thus five in the second or vice versa), you can start out with the awesome five-cost card and chapel.
For serious competitive play, all players should have the same opening split, or get to choose 5/2 or 4/3. Chapel games tend to make this weakness obvious
> For serious competitive play, all players should have the same opening split
I would consider the Dominion League[1] to be serious competitive play, but it doesn't require that (also the current online client doesn't support that, presumably due to lack of demand) but what it does is to balance which player starts first, which can often lead to wins since in the end the game is often decided by a single turn.
I have the first edition and after playing both I completely agree, the replacement cards are overall much better. To the point where I rarely ever want to play my own set.
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.
I do have a bit of a ban list. Possession, minion, masquerade. The cards that take over the board nearly every time. I’ve not much desire to play yet another minion game.
Theory is a legendary player, and his take on the game is truly excellent.
I wish the simple, fast, text interface of the old isotropic implementation still existed though. I had a definite addiction to Dominion in college - three hours a day online for months - and the isotropic implementation shutting down was the thing that finally cured me. The depth, and the possibility of just ten minutes more for a wholly new kingdom, was so incredibly enjoyable, even if I never became an elite player...
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.
Just in case you're not aware, the online version that replaced Isotropic shut down a few years ago (2017, I think?) and has been replaced by a client that people seem to like (I certainly do), found at https://dominion.games.
The enormous variety is absolutely a strength, but can also be a weakness. When my daughter was a baby, my partner and I used to play a lot of Dominion with another couple who had had a child around the same time— it worked well as a quick, easily-interruptible game that could mostly be played with one hand as needed.
Initially it was the Intrigue base game (theme: cards with choices) and Prosperity (theme: treasures with side effects) and we played probably several hundred games. But later on as the other couple got more and more of the expansions, the game became less and less balanced— even with just Seaside and Hinterlands added to the game, it would have required significant study of all of the additional cards and their effects in order to have any hope of forming a coherent strategy on each game. And since that time several more expansions have come out [1].
Is this bad? No, not necessarily. Obviously if the various modules are stored separately in their individual boxes it's easy to just play with the cards that everyone at the table feels they have a reasonable comfort level with. But I think that feeling of being overwhelmed by the possibilities did ultimately lead us to playing other, more self-contained games like Agricola.
For me, minmaxing takes the fun out of any game. I like plays best when everyone has played the game often enough to know the rules, but now often enough to really think through a strategy.
I enjoy the process of figuring out the right strategy; one of the things Dominion does well is that it gives you that "figuring out the best strategy" experience every time, in a way, because each time you're seeing a different spread of cards and having to figure out what the winning strategy is. I'm not sure how you're defining "minmaxing"; for me playing to win is very much part of the fun, but a game goes stale once you've figured out the strategy to the point that you're just executing it every time you play.
For me, constantly losing or being close to last place takes the fun out of the game.
I've played 7 Wonders for years, and recently played with friends. I kept losing despite thinking I had a grasp on the game. Recently I read an exhaustive advanced guide on BGG and from that point forward I've finished close to 1st/2nd with my friends.
Yeah, related to this, I wanted to comment on this paragraph on the article:
> There should be no reason to ever study a game where a beginner stands a reasonable chance of winning. I want a game that rewards experience, that permits further study, that has meaning to its replayability.
I agree with you and disagree with the article on this point. I think a truly good game must have an explicit, adjustable factor of randomness or odds so you can match different levels of players and play for fun. It's hard to balance, but that's the point of game design: rules simple enough to be accessible, but that at the same time can combine in infinite ways giving each game depth, and have the opportunity to match players of different levels without that being overwhelming.
The only game I have ever found that is both worthy of study and where a newbie could beat a master a reasonable percentage of the time is poker.
The randomness makes poker nearly impossible to study though. You can only look back and determine if your decision was right if you had had complete information, but you didn’t and won’t in the future so that’s not as meaningful as it may be on other games.
I just played my first game of Dominion (2nd edition) with my wife last night. Really fun, except, coming from MtG, it became obvious to me to build an engine with +cards and +actions. My last 2 hands I cycled through my entire deck multiple times until I played basically every card. This seemed a bit tedious, overpowered, and easily achievable. Having only played 1 game though, I'm not sure: is this how almost all games are won?
I got into dominion at the start of the first lockdown and have played close to 400 games since, the one thing that helped me improve was remember a Big Money or Big Money/+Cards deck normally wins in 14-17 turns so any strategy you choose should beat that time.
Not necessarily "any strategy" - if you have interactive kingdoms it may be better to slow your opponent down (feed them curses, feed them junk, make them discard,outpace their Province/Duchy-driven victory points via alternate victory cards, etc). In "engine vs big money" or "engine dittos", you are totally correct in that you need to have the superior engine.
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.
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.
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.
The typical length of a game varies with the number of players. It sounds like their first game was with 2 players and like you typically are in larger groups?
I think the author is overstating the strategy space of the game. For example, a common strategy is to build an “engine” using +draw +action cards. There are _many_ possible engines to build, but that is more tactical.
Edit: I just checked my online profile, and I’ve played over 6000 games.
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.
I feel a game between two Dominion aficionados is probably pretty fun, but as the person with a friend who's into Dominion, I hate the stupid game.
Very simply: 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.
But that also makes it a terrible party game. There should always be benefits to experience and skill, but the near complete lack of randomness in Dominion, compared to something simpler like Ascension, makes it really unpleasant to play if there's a skill gap.
> 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.
I think my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549645 explains why I find Dominion uniquely terrible to play with mismatched skill levels, beyond just the "no chance of winning" aspect.
In video games, we call this "snowballing", where once you or your team is losing, the power differential continues to grow, to the point it's not fun. This can happen in MOBAs where teams level, and get more powerful each time they do... the larger the level differential, the less fun the game is for all involved. As soon as the losing team has no chance to recover, there's not much reason for them to continue playing... And the lack of challenge usually gives the winning players or team an unsatisfactory game too, there's no challenge.
In games with a mechanic that snowballs, generally, the game developers try to tune it out, ensuring that players and teams stay within a one or two level margin... a margin that the losing team at least stands a chance of recovering from.
Dominion is not just a game with a snowball effect, but one that does not remotely try to curb it.
>That's basically true for any game where there's a wide range of possible skill levels.
In the last few years I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of collaborative board games. 5 Minute Dungeon is more fun than it has any right to be. My family really enjoyed Pandemic. Haven't tried Gloomhaven but it seems fun as well.
Then there's the whole style of DnD types games, even if they're a bit different.
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 think part of Dominion's engine-building mechanics is what makes it terrible to play if going up against someone more experienced: My friend would need five minutes to take his turn, while everyone else had a card or two to play. It wasn't fun sitting through.
At least with chess, every player is making one move per turn, it always feels fair, even when you are less skilled.
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.
Yeah, another commenter suggested a handicap too, but how I am supposed to figure out what handicap is "fair". If this was important to the game developers, it should be on them to determine it.
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.
One of the reasons I prefer Tanto Cuore (which is more or less a Dominion clone) is that there are always attack options on the board. Usually when I introduce a new group to the game there'll come a point about 3/4 of the way through where they all notice that I'm ahead and spend a round or two all buying Bad Habit cards for me, and I nod to myself and say "yep, they've got it" and lose.
> More importantly, your opponents help dictate your tempo. The goal isn’t to score as many VPs as you can; it’s to have the most VPs by the end of the game. How your opponents play affects how the game ends, and which of the game-end conditions you should pursue.
I’ve been curious about if this is actually a thing - it definitely happens in real life when playing, but why? Surely absent of interaction cards (which some games don’t have) there would be a strategy to optimise and reduce the number of turns to getting the required victory points regardless of how fast your opponent is going.
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.
Sorry if I wasn't being clear, what I meant was isn't there an optimum tempo between being 'too quick' and getting choked with VP cards and 'too slow' and not getting choked, regardless of what my opponent does (excluding the effect of interaction cards).
Like - does what my opponent do significantly change my strategy? (other than balance your deck to respond to attacks). Surely the best tempo is still the best tempo.
The length of a game varies according to what the players do. If your opponent plays a slow strategy, and you a quick one, not only will your deck become useless to do anything with, but you will lose your power to control game length (as it is tied to buying cards), so your opponent will be free to extend the game length.
It's more obvious in games with platinums and colonies. If your opponent is going for colonies, you can win by getting all the provinces for yourself. You have to make a quick read on if they're going big or not, to decide if you can play fast or not.
The game length is significantly different depending on whether all players are following the same strategy (so buying the same cards) or not. So you have to adapt to that, and there are meta questions about that.
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.
This article is from 2012, so while it is still an interesting read and the base concepts of the game discussed remain there today, it is also pretty outdated nowadays.
The game has evolved, with a lot of new expansions added (coming with new cards and new mechanics) and the communities knowledge about the game has grown.
If you'd like to get to know the game from a more modern angle, I recommend checking out the dominion discord [0]. It's where a lot of the discussion happens nowadays. If you have any questions about the game, you can just ask in #dominion and there will usually be people willing to help. There are also dedicated strategy discussion channels (e.g. #kingdom-analysis), there's a bot through which you can access data about competitive play (with some really neat and detailed stat sheets about individual cards, made by a member of the community), and you can learn by watching high level players play and commentate on their games.
I LOVE this game but also think the steep learning curve for any new entrants into a group which is already familiar with the sets in question gives a big advantage to the veteran players.
I also think with too many expansions mixed together you end up with some very interesting and sometimes very dull games (all +money, no +action or +card). The sets are very well-designed to play within themselves, but when mixed with others the results can be mixed.
Last, too many mats and tokens to keep track of really detracts from fun with the game.
All this being said I have 6 expansions I have picked up with my partner over Craigslist and FB Marketplace and will continue to hunt for more!
Deep down in the review sits what can be a deal breaker for some - including myself:
> X-Factors
>
> I prefer to play this game online instead of in person. First, games are significantly faster (10 minutes instead of 30, plus no setup/teardown), but more importantly, it eliminates the need to constantly shuffle your cards. If you play this game in person, you have to deal with these annoying factors, which I admit may detract from the experience. Then again, this is a flaw common to most Eurogames, so take from that what you will.
I play board games exclusively in physical form. The moment you are playing using computer, your competition suddenly grows enormously and some of your design choices become flawed (because e.g. keeping state is hard for people and trivial for computers). I don't believe board games can win that competition.
The physical form has its unique appeal: tactile experience, being offline and distraction free, no stupid sign up requirements etc.
Of course I realise there will be some that disagree with me, but that is fine!
We've played a couple hundred games ourselves. Each player in our group has predictable styles -- one is the aggressor, one is the engine-economist, one is the creative, one is the flexible. I'm the card-chooser, we have around ~10 expansions in a box and I pick around 5 randomly, then I round out with fan picks or what we think it needs.
The game truly is deep. There are so many cards, numerous mechanics, counting your own and your opponent's cards, timing your green-buying, balancing deck control vs. buying high-value cards, etc.
It was a little surprising to see this here after I just came from playing Dominion :) I think it articulates well a lot of what I like about the game. I'm not very good at the game, compared to other players out there, but I still think there's accessible strategy and variety.
I'm curious what motivated posting this particular article now…
And by the way, this should have a (2012) tag in the title @dang.
I only played a few dominion games but could already feel that the Witch card is strong because it forces players to adjust. I also think it has a slightly higher winrate.
I fucking hate the strategizing that goes on with board and card games. You can't just have a casual game. Someone in your group thinks themselves a "player" and has to ruin the day with minimaxing or whining when they're strategy didn't work against novices because novices are essentially random agents. You can't just play a game and have some fun in the moment. Everything has to be dissected. Every move you make has to be criticized. It's disgusting. I like games, but I almost never play them because I can't stand the fucking nerd culture around them.
It's probably been the going with my wife to Mensa's Mindgames convention every year that has pushed me here. Too many people tie up their identity into being able to best everyone else 100% of the time. Frankly, being good at card games doesn't make you smart. Anyone could do a frequency analysis and figure out an optimal strategy. That's just being boring and an asshole.
Honestly, my favorite games either have much more of a random element, or take a crowd judgement, rather than a Turing Machine-cum-card-deck. If I wanted to program, I'd write a program.
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
He leaves out my biggest criticism, there is no form of errata/banning. When an overpowered card enters the fray, you just have to play it. Minion's on the board? Guess we're just fighting for 'em.
Chapel should cost more than 2 no matter what Vaccarino says. Probably 5. Etc.
Vaccarino is a great game designer but I think the playtesting could be better sometimes, and unlike CCGs with developed tournament systems there's no changing a card once it's out there ever.