Dominion - Game

Now that I have adult children, I am reaping the rewards of their game-playing interests.  The latest game which they introduced me to is Dominion, by Rio Grande Games.  We played a couple of games a while back, and I just knew that The Dudes would like it for a Dude Night game.

Last night, I brought it, and taught it, and we had a great time.

Dominion has a design which is unique among games I've tried.  It's a turn-based strategy game -- like many of our favorites.  It's medieval/kingdom-building in theme -- still, pretty common.  It has victory points which must be accumulated -- again, nothing new there.  But having each player start out with exactly the same resources (represented by cards), and then building a "deck" over time by "spending" cards to acquire more -- that's pretty rare in a game without a board.

The turns are simple -- and are cleverly designed.  Each turn has three phases:
1) Action
2) Buy
3) Clean-up which includes discarding your hand and drawing a new hand.

Notice that drawing a full hand is the last thing you do.  Most games have the "draw" phase first.  Why does this matter?

Well, one of the keys to a strategy game is planning.  Having a full hand of cards at the end of your turn allows you a full cycle through the other players' turns to think strategically.  And, as a bonus, it really encourages a speedy game.  Because your hand doesn't change (typically) from the end of your turn to the start of your next turn, you can be ready to act quickly on your turn.

The Ticket to Ride games have a similar make-up -- but they do this by limiting each turn to one action, so if you draw cards you cannot play them on the same turn.  That works out very well, too, but the interaction between players and cards is very limited in Ticket to Ride.  Dominion has a great deal of interaction among the cards, and sometimes among players.  This means a turn needs more than just one phase.  Giving the "draw" to the end phase works very, very well.

If you like strategy games, and games that don't take all night (we learned the game, and played twice, in four hours) you will enjoy Dominion.