Designer: Donald X Vaccarino
Once upon a time, there was a game called Magic: the Gathering, a collectible card game. In this game, you build a deck outside the game, and bring it into battle. It did okay, but then Dominion came, with a different core idea — what if building the deck was actually the game?
The box art suggests that you’re trying to build a town or a kingdom or something, but the theme is pretty pasted on. In actuality, you’re building an engine. You start with a handful of copper cards, and use them to purchase available cards, which may be better money cards, victory points, or cards that let you draw more cards, thin your deck of useless cards, purchase more cards per turn, or mess with other players. It is the original deckbuilding game, and one that has been copied extensively by other games. We will see many more deckbuilders on this list.
Interesting Mechanic: Stable Source Piles. I could just say ‘deckbuilding’, but that would be too easy. Instead, I wanted to call attention to something that Dominion does that most of its copycats don’t do. Most of the competitors have a rotating market of cards – when one is purchased, it is replaced by a different card, which means that it might not be there when its your turn.
Dominion doesn’t work that way. It has about 16 stacks of cards, and each stack is identical. Someone else can buy your card and, assuming the pile isn’t fully depleted you can buy it too. This makes it much easier for you to try to target the engine you want to build. Furthermore, ten of the card stacks are chosen randomly from each game, and now that the game has a gazillion expansions, that random means a great deal of variance between games. Each game is, therefore, a different puzzle, with each player trying to figure out how to make the best engine out of the same available ingredients.
Dominion is only so low for me personally because I’ve played it so much I’m a little weary of it. Still, I do consider it an essential gateway game, and I’d go even farther and say that this is a game that literally every game designer should own.
(Photo Credit: Geek Dad)
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