Dominon: Card Game

Dominion is a turn-based card game created by Donald X. The objective of the game is to get the most victory points by the end of the game. To do so the players build a deck of cards, all with certain beneficial actions that will gain them coins to buy victory points as well as new cards. 

Each player starts with a small deck of cards. On the table are 10 piles of cards that can be bought and added to your hand. Taking turns the players draw cards from their deck and are allowed certain actions. Once a player has gone through their entire deck they reshuffle their discard pile and start drawing again. As the game progress the players keep adding new cards to their deck that will help them get victory points. Once the game is over the players count their victory points to see who has the most.

Dominion has a medieval theme to it and reminds me in a lot of ways of Magic: The Gathering card games. However unlike Magic players don’t have to buy decks but instead build them throughout the course of the game. This is a mechanic that I quite like. Magic often has a lot of money involved in it with players spending quite large sums trying to get certain cards. With Dominion all players start equally and it is truly the skill and strategy of the player that determines the outcome rather than how much money you have. Constantly adding and shuffling to the deck was a mechanic I haven’t seen in any other game and it worked quite well.

There are also several different card types that can allow for a varied gameplay. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work out well. When playing Dominion we got piles of cards that were mostly passive cards and only one slightly attacking card. So for an hour or so we just sort of played with ourselves, gathering victory points and never had an interaction with each other. While I can’t speak for the entire game since I haven’t tried all the card combinations I missed having a game that was based slightly more on attack and defense and where it was about trying to beat each other physically rather than finically. This also lead to the most anti-climatic finish to a game that I have played. After playing for over an hour we decided to stop the game. We counted the points and concluded that it was a tie between me and another player. Then we went home. There was no sense of victory or triumph. The victory points just seemed like virtual money that you had spent hours collecting before realizing that they aren’t worth anything.

As for the narrative, while the cards did seem very medieval and knightly, the lack of waging war really took away from the narrative. Instead I felt like an outdated Monopoly man trying to gather as much land as possible. I never felt like I was fighting for a territory against my fellow players or that I was in control of any form of land. I would have like to have seen a deeper and more detailed integration of the narrative into the gameplay.  

While I had heard many good reviews of the game I don’t think I would play it again. Perhaps I owe it the game designer to try a different set of cards, as I felt like this was the main issue with the game session I had. Or Dominion might just be a too strategically based game for me, as I need some decisive action and attacking to keep me entertained when it comes to card games. I applaud the game for bringing new mechanics, rarely seen in the game industry to the table but with a weak narrative I don’t feel hooked by the game.