Rio Grande Games - Dominion: First Edition

Dominion is deck-building card game. At the beginning of the game, all players start with the same hand of 10 cards (7 copper, 3 estate victory point cards). During the course of the game, players can buy additional cards including estate, duchy, and province victory cards; copper, silver, and gold treasure cards; and 10 action cards. The mechanics of a turn are simple and described by ABC - take an action, buy new cards, and clean up. Newly purchased cards, used action cards, and any unused cards from the 5 card hand are put in the discard pile and new cards are drawn from the player's deck. Once the player's deck is exhausted, their discard pile is shuffled and becomes the player's deck. So in the course of play, the newly purchased cards work their way into the deck.Since all players start with the same hand and have access to the same cards, there are many different approaches that can be used to play the game. Dominion also has some aspects that tend to self-balance the game. Purchased victory point cards become part of the deck, but they only have value at the end of the game -- during the game, they take the spot of what could have been a useful action card or a treasure card.Dominion also has a great deal of depth. 10 different types action cards are used for a game, but the box comes with 25 types of action cards. The instructions give suggestions for set of 10 action card that work well to learn about the different cards, but the game can also be played with a random selection of cards. This means there are over 3 million ways to choose the cards!You'll find that your strategy in Dominion is constantly evolving. When first playing with a group of cards, you may find that one or two of the cards seem to be extremely powerful. However, after playing a few more times, you may start to find those cards to be overrated and shift to a different approach and cards. Cards that seemed useless when you first started to play will all of a sudden seem to be very powerful. The creators of the game extensively play-tested it, so the card costs are very well thought out.If you're used to CCGs (collectible card games, ie Magic the Gathering), Dominion should be very easy to pick up. If you don't like CCGs because they seem very poorly balanced (where one powerful card is a game winner), give Dominion a chance. It is very well balanced and has a lot of depth. If you don't know what a CCG is or have never played one, you may find Dominion to be a fun addition to your game night.

As an extensive board, RPG and card gamer since birth, I have had opportunities to play a ton of games. Some I have played a lot (AD&D, WH40K, M:TG - quite literally tens of thousands of hours of that life sapper), some I have tossed asunder after a round or two. Overall, though, I found that I always come back to the same games when the new stuff drifts into the dusty recesses of my shelves. Magic: the Gathering was the one that kept resurrecting itself until after more than a DECADE playing it, I retired from competitive play and then from any play at all. That said, I still miss certain aspects of the game. Obviously the competitive nature of it was tantamount to its attractiveness - you versus another where you were taking his life away; but the STRATEGY of construction and deck testing was the best part of the game. At the highest levels of MtG, the Pro Tour, players spend what amounts to overtime each week (40 hours of labor or more!) constructing, dissecting, testing, discussing and refining their customized decks to determine the strongest ones. With the internet, they yammer endlessly about mana curve and and broken cards with other top players throughout the world. It is a JOB, but it is a fun job. Within the arena of construction can be found the base addiction to the game, always looking for another combination that could create a deck so powerful the Wizards of the Coast had no choice but to ban a component card or errata away the potency for tourney play. The quest for the unbeatable deck...rages on even today nearly reaching two decades and tens of thousands of different cards.Enter a wife and two wonderful children (actually second wife, MtG may have been a contributing factor in the disappearance of the first /grin). Gaming time drops to near zero... My wife is an adamant non-player. We played poker a lot back before the kiddos, and some low-strat board games. After the kids, we no longer had time to play decent strategy games - most of which required a lot of preparation or extensive attention for several hours to really feel like you'd done it justice. Two items that were simply out of stock for newly-parents. I still checked up on the world of board games, salivating over Settlers of Catan and Agricola and Carcassone... Then I saw Dominion popping up with incredible reviews - so I took a flyer and bought it to play on holiday with my venerable opponent - my brother, a single dad who had a very similar history. We played it to death once the kids went down for the night, while my wife chit chatted with us and paid a little attention to the game. Endlessly we played, shuffling cards over and over, and we found the strategic intricacies to be incredibly deep. Thanks to the shifting of the available cards each game, no two games were the same - basic strategies emerged for every card and for combinations of those cards, but the improvisational-deck-building-mechanic was incredibly addictive. My wife watched, but did not bite. The holiday ended, and I moped that I would no longer have the time or the opponents to play the game to which I was now deeply addicted. Then DW surprised me and said she would play it with me as a Christmas gift. Her revelation to me was that games that required strategy seemed too "brainy" for her - that it would require so much thinking as to ruin the fun nature of playing - whereas in Hold 'em, it was less what you had than knowing what your opponent had and a little clevage could throw him off his game. I nursed game one along so that she got a feel for the mechanics, and she won. I certainly did not give 100%, because a win for her meant the potential of a game two for me. She won game two - this time a little less passivity on my part. Then game three...and the night was over, but my addiction had been satiated for a day. Today, she ASKED to play again. She ASKED to play a high-strategy game. I'm setting the hook to pull in a lunker.Dominion can bridge the non-gamer gap - the basics are simple enough that nearly anyone can play. The depth of the game is deep enough to whet the appetites of all but the most intense miniatures players or historical war gamers. The Magic playing friends will absolutely love the draft-style construction, and the casual gamers will appreciate that a game takes only 30 minutes in most circumstances after a couple learning games. Dominion is really fun with two players, but adding up to two more increases the fun-quotient. Rio Grande has released several expansions which seem to add even more depth and breadth to the mix - Intrigue can be merged with the base set to allow for games of up to EIGHT players; which would seem to get very hairy, but no less fun. I very heartily suggest Dominion for those who are looking for a strategy game with the convenience of a card game without forgetting that card drawing will diminish strategy - since you are building your deck on the fly, refining it leads to the odds and probability factor that you see in games like MtG. The prices here at Amazon are amazing - if you feel like a spending spree, they've recently offered a base set + a couple expansions for a great price, with a bonus of a card mat to help the layout of the game - it seems well worth it if you are fairly confident you want to give this game a go.I don't think I could be happier with this purchase.

El Dominion es ya un clásico en casa y da para horas y horas de diversión. Esperamos comprar pronto las expansiones. El paquete llegó en perfecto estado y con todo su contenido.

「Dominion」が気に入ったので、日本語版ではないもののシリーズとして購入した。自分で鑑賞している分については問題ない。ただ、中に入っていた。栞のようなものがカード類に挟まれてくしゃくしゃになっていたのはいただけない。輸入品の扱いの雑さがここでも際立っている。

Mucha repetibilidad, pues siempre que lo jueges tendrás nuevas combinaciones de cartas. Lo pueden jugar desde niños de ocho años.

its our face fammily game and loved the prompt delivery ;)

Excellent game for anyone from 10 - 80.Easy to learn, looks slightly complicated, but actually takes about 10 minutes to understand the basics.Great for the whole family: even wives like it.Very fast paced, and games are over in 30 minutes.Have played with mixed language (French-English) groups with no problem, as long as everyone can read a little English.Exists in VF.