Spurious Logic

Dominion...

So last Friday I received a copy of Dominion.

It is fantastic. I've rarely been excited about the idea of a board game just from reading the rules.

Here's the thing, it's not a board game; not at all. It's a collectible card game (remember them? Magic: the Gathering, Illumanati, Netrunner, Mythos, Rage... yes I did have a misspent adolesence) but without the collectible aspect.

There's 3 types of card,

There are 25 types of kingdom cards available but you only pick 10 types to use in each game (*usually*).

So at the start of each game all the cards down on the table are face up. Three stacks of money cards, three stacks of victory cards and 10 stacks of kingdom cards (10 cards in each stack).

Each player then takes 7 value 1 money cards (called copper ) and 3 value 1 victory cards (called estates). Each player then shuffles these 10 cards together and places them face down. This is the deck for that player. Before starting you draw 5 cards.

Basically you'll have money and victory cards in your hand and you can then buy money/victory/kingdom cards which are added to your discard pile. You can play 1 action and buy 1 card per turn (*unless allowed by kingdom cards to do more* i.e. The Market action allows you to draw another card to your hand, play another action and buy and additional card). Once your done with actions/buying all the cards played and cards in your hand go into the discard pile and you draw 5 new cards from your deck. If there aren't five cards in your deck, you shuffle the discard pile and place it face down; it then becomes your new deck and you draw up to 5 from it. In this way the cards you buy become part of the deck.

Once either 1)all the money is gone 2)all the value 3 victory cards are gone the game ends. The winner is the player with the highest total value of victory cards in their deck.

The naive approach is to just buy as many victory cards as you can, but after a few rounds you'll be drawing nothing but victory cards and you won't be able to buy anything.

So the whole game is about deck building. Maintaining a balance on the card types in your deck while at the same time keeping an eye on what the opponent is doing. I'm thinking that it just taps into the OCD geek that's in all of us.

downsides? Too much shuffling.