Overview & How to Play

Dominion is literally just cards.

That’s it! You’re building a deck full of cards, where the goal is to have the most points via green land cards. On your turn, you’ll draw until you have 5 cards.

With those 5 cards, every turn you have a limit of playing 1 Action Card, and buying 1 card from the Supply. However, these restrictions can be easily increased by Action Cards, which tend to grant EXTRA actions and buys, in addition to unique beneficial effects. For example, there is a ‘Village’ Action Card, that when played, grants 2 additional actions, and lets you draw a card from your deck.

You can also buy better types of money, and the aforementioned land to win the game. At the end of the round, you discard any card in your hand you didn’t use, then draw again.

Dominion is just: draw 5 cards. Play some actions. Throw money at stuff. Draw 5 cards again. Players are probably buying strong money, and more actions to eventually buy the best land for each of their kingdoms. Once 3 piles of cards runs out, or the strongest ‘Province’ land pile disappears, the game ends, and you count up your score to see who has the noblest kingdom, aka who exploited feudalism the hardest.

Pros

If you don’t know anything about Dominion, you at least know by now that it’s all about cards—and thank goodness the cards are all great quality. What’s more, the box is excellently organized, with its own little cubby! Replay value is so clear with 26 modular piles of cards.

Dominion is one of those games that is SO easy to rope people in, because it’s so easy to understand. All you’re doing on a turn is playing actions, then buying something. Even if you haven’t played deckbuilders before, this is very clear.

Yet for how simple this loop is, Dominion is filled with fun decisionmaking opportunities. You can typically always buy something on your turn, and you have so many options with 10 different piles that rotate out, victory point cards, and better money cards. Then, there’s sometimes the ability to buy multiple things a turn if you have extra buys, and you might even want your deck to be as thick as possible to get more points from a VP card called a Garden, that rewards thick chunky decks.

There’s a ton of diversity with the Action Cards you’re buying in general, from a Chapel letting you trash cards from your deck permanently, a Militia that attacks your opponents’ hands, and then massive drawing power with a Smithy.

Combos start getting immensely satisfying, where you can double the effect of cards, or use cards to chain actions, like playing a Village that gives you +2 actions, while letting you draw a card off your deck. Or there’s expensive cards that lets you take a card IMMEDIATELY into your hand, so you can play it right away.

Dominion also never feels like it drags, at about 30 minutes once you know the cards, making it a very convenient play.

We wanna shoutout the purple Curse cards, which are an amazing mechanic to slow your opponents’ decks. Basically, you give their decks a free-of-charge garbage card that is worth negative points, and they can draw it! Just like everything in Dominion, this card is built into their decks for them to draw turn after turn. Curses do a great job of making players think differently when they’re given out, like finding a way to discard them and draw more, trash them permanently, or buy a defensive card.

With this ‘deck’ that’s being built up, its super safe to say that Dominion has amazing progression, with you starting out with a lowly kingdom with just 7 Coppers cards & 3 Estates cards. This eventually gets added onto to make your kingdom better and better, potentially trashing cards out of your deck permanently to make way for Provinces, chain-able Action Cards, Gold cards, so on and so forth. Late game tends to be an utter scramble for points, as there’s only so many high-point cards in the game.

In fact, late-game can really sneak up on you, where you can’t focus on having the fastest, best engine anymore, because combos don’t mean diddly-squat when you can’t get your hands on the actual points to win! It’s tricky to pinpoint when exactly is the best time to go all-in on lands, since buying them too early will slow down your deck, and too late is not enough points.

Cons & Nitpicks

The only real substantial con is that going first is always inherently better in this game. See, whenever any of the 3 supply piles disappear, or the highest point province pile, the game immediately ends. This is a BIG deal in 2 players.

As for nitpicks, this game has a LOT of shuffling, with decks only starting at 10 cards, and with players drawing 5 cards every turn. The better your group is at shuffling, the less downtime you’ll have. Another nitpick comes in with the game being a little solitaire, where we would have liked to see at least 1 or 2 more cards that force more interaction in the base set. In fact, one of the ways this game has defensive interactions is through a ‘moat’ card, which has zero nuance whatsoever.

Final Thoughts

Besides the shuffling schnegians, this game just flows really well. Really, Dominion just has this one-more-match flow to it, because the game length runs faster the more you play, and consecutive games are so easy to get rolling. You’re deconstructing your deck anyways after a game to take out all the land cards, so you might as well make a fresh deck for a new game while you’re at it.