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Dominion - card game

The box cover of Dominion
Players 2 to 4 (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion)
Age range 10 and up
Playing time ~30 minutes
Random chance Medium
Skill(s) required Resource management, Planning

Dominion is a deck-building game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Each player uses a separate deck of cards; players draw their hands from their own decks, not others'. Players use their cards to perform actions and buy cards from a common pool of card stacks, including Action, Treasure, and Victory cards. The player with the most victory points wins. The game has a light medieval theme, with card names that reference pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures.

Some have drawn parallels with collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering, but Dominion players build their decks ad hoc as the game proceeds. (Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration.) Dominion is the first game of its kind and has spawned a genre of similar card-based games dubbed "deck-building games".

The game was released at Spiel 2008 in multiple languages and voted best game of the fair by the Fairplay polls with a rating of 1.75 from 147 votes. In 2009, it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis awards. It was one of five winning games in American Mensa's 2009 MindGame competition. By the end of 2010, more than one million copies of it and its expansions had been sold worldwide.

Gameplay

Dominion is a deck-building card game in which two to four players compete to gather the most valuable deck of cards. The game features four classes of cards:

Some cards feature additional type designations. Attack cards hurt other players, such as forcing them to discard cards from their hand or gain Curse cards. Reaction cards can be triggered out of turn in response to a certain event, such as other players' Attacks.

A game of Dominion in progress at the 2011 PAX East exposition

The game is always set up with the same seven stacks of basic cards; three stacks of Victory cards, one stack of Curse cards, and three stacks of Treasure cards. In addition, ten stacks of Kingdom cards (typically Action cards) are added to the table. The Kingdom cards can be either selected by the players or chosen randomly. Certain Kingdom cards from the game's expansions might require additional stacks, such as the Potion card (a Treasure card) from the "Alchemy" expansion. These piles represent the finite Supply of cards. Finally, each player receives the same starting deck of ten cards, consisting of seven basic Treasure cards and usually three basic Victory cards. Each player shuffles their deck and draws the top five cards to form their hand.

Each turn, the player performs the following phases in order (abbreviated as "ABC"):

If the player must draw a card from their deck, but their deck is empty, they shuffle their discard pile to create a new deck. Some Action cards can trash cards, removing them from players' decks and into the "trash", where they are out of the game unless certain actions from the Dark Ages expansion are used to recover them.

The game ends under two conditions: when the stack of Province cards (the highest-value Victory card in the base game) has been exhausted, or when any three other stacks in the Supply have been exhausted. Players then count the number of Victory Points in their decks, and the player with the highest score wins. Other end-game conditions have been introduced in the game's expansions.

The game has been compared to the "draft" gameplay style of collectible card games where players vie for the best deck from a common pool of cards. Usually, the game's main strategy is to build a deck that maximizes the player's ability to draw hands with 8 coins. This allows the player to buy a Province card, the highest value Victory card in the base game. Players must balance effective deck building to reach this coin goal with the acquisition of Victory cards to win the game; most Victory cards have no value during most of the game and dilute a player's deck of Treasure and Action cards.

History

Vaccarino was a video game programmer and developer in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s. He spent time playing new German-style board games, prior to the release of Magic: The Gathering in 1993. His interest in Magic sparked his own development of a 90-card fan-made extension for the game, Edge of the World, and he became an informal contributor towards additional Magic works. He is credited in the official Magic rulebook. He developed several game ideas in the intervening years and discussed them with Magic '​s creator, Richard Garfield.

In 2006, Vaccarino invented the deck-building mechanic while working on a fantasy adventure card game called "Spirit Warriors II". He struggled with the mechanics of the game before a deadline of showing the game to his local gaming group, and spent one weekend to strip down the game to its core elements; specifically, having problems with the concept of introducing cards that could be acquired over time, Vaccarino instead opted to simply have all such cards available at the start of the game. Vaccarino introduced the game to his local gaming group at a gaming store; the game immediately became popular, overshadowing the usual staples including Magic over the next two years.

With the success of the game with his local group, Vaccarino began looking to refine and publish the game. During the 2007 Origins Game Fair, Vaccarino demonstrated the game and gained the interest of Rio Grande Games. Shortly after being signed on with Rio Grande, BoardGameGeek's columnists Valerie Putman and Dale Yu requested Rio Grande to allow them to develop the game. During development, Dominion was called "Castle Builder", due to its theme of building rooms in a castle, and then, later, "Game X"; Yu is credited with the final name of Dominion. Vaccarino had planned early on for the game to grow through expansions, though focused these on maintaining the core functionality of the game instead of immediately adding "exotic things"; this was to ensure that, if the game did take off, early expansions would not create two disparate sets of cards, one focused on the normal Dominion play, and a second with a strange new mechanic. In a post to BoardGameGeek, Vaccarino suggested that he had originally planned seven different expansions from the start, and in fact, in tuning the core game for release, took cards originally planned for later expansions into the base game.

Dominion has been translated into 18 languages (Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, bokmål Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish), comprising 6 different alphabets.

Releases

"Standalone" means that the set comes with the basic cards required to play: Estates, Duchies, Provinces, Coppers, Silvers, Golds, Curses, and a Trash card.

Name Re­lease Date Type Cards Kinds of King­dom card Theme
Dom­in­ion (Base game) Oc­to­ber 2008 Stand­a­lone 500 25 The ori­gin­al game. Relatively simple cards.
In­trigue July 2009 Stand­a­lone and Ex­pan­sion 500 25 Decisions among multiple possible effects. Hybrid cards that are both Victory cards and another type.
Sea­side Oc­to­ber 2009 Ex­pan­sion 300 26 Duration cards (cards with effects that happen longer than one turn). Coin tokens.
Al­che­my May 2010 Ex­pan­sion 150 12 The Potion Treasure as an alternate card cost, with cards that require a Potion as well as Coin to be bought. Decks with large numbers of Action cards.
Pros­per­i­ty Oc­to­ber 2010 Ex­pan­sion 300 25 Expensive cards and Treasures that do something when played in the Buy phase. Higher-value basic Treasure and Victory cards. Victory Point tokens. Coin tokens.
Cor­nu­co­pi­a June 2011 Ex­pan­sion 150 13 Cards that are more useful when there is variety in the player's deck.
Hin­ter­lands Oc­to­ber 2011 Ex­pan­sion 300 26 Cards that have an additional effect when bought or otherwise gained.
Dark Ages August 2012 Ex­pan­sion 500 35 Cards that have an additional effect when trashed. Cards that care about the Trash. Cards that upgrade themselves. Ways to upgrade other cards. Shelters (initial three cards), Ruins (bad cards), Spoils (one-use golds), Looters (cards that give Ruins), Knights (a pile with 10 different cards).
Guilds June 2013 Ex­pan­sion 150 13 Coin tokens that can be saved to spend later. Cards you can get more out of by paying extra for them.
Adventures April 2015 Ex­pan­sion 400 30 Reserve cards (cards that are set aside when played and can be used when the right moment comes), Events (immediate effects that players can buy), Traveller cards (cards that can be exchanged for other cards), player-owned tokens that modify cards, Duration cards.
Base Cards June 2012 Replacement cards 250 0 (A set of all the basic cards - Treasures, Victory, and Curse cards - from the standalones and expansions with new design and different art. No Kingdom Cards.)

Vaccarino originally planned to stop expanding the game after Guilds, though he conceded:

"Still, it’s likely that at some point the publishers will want another expansion and, well, I like to be friendly. So I can’t guarantee that Guilds is the end of the line, but you can at least think of it as a dividing point between regular expansions and occasional expansions."

Since then, the set Adventures was released, as well as the promotional cards Prince and Summon.

Promotional cards

Mini-expansions, most consisting of a set of a single kind of Kingdom card, have been released as promotional items:

Online play

A licensed browser-based online implementation of Dominion, hosted by Goko, went live in early March 2013. It was originally intended to be released to the public on August 16, 2012, but because of bugs and server overload, it was withdrawn from public release and returned to beta testing. The official app provides the base Dominion game free to play, and cards from the expansions are available for a fee.

Several unofficial online implementations of Dominion existed prior to the official implementation's launch; Rio Grande Games has requested that these unofficial Dominion implementations be discontinued now that the official online implementation is released. One of these unofficial implementations, located at dominion.isotropic.org, was used by Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino and his playtesters during the development of new cards, even long after the site was closed to the public.

Outsourcing storage

Since the game and its expansions feature over 3000 cards, Rio Grande Games has licensed manufacturers' creation of containers to store all the cards into one or two boxes.

Awards

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