Thursday, January 15, 2009

Master of Your Domain

There's another game that's stormed my group of friends lately. This time it wasn't me that bought it. But like Race for the Galaxy, which I recently spoke of, it's been played a whole lot of times in a very short period of time. Also, that initial copy has already prodded others in the group to buy their own.

That game is Dominion. It's a card game that seemingly brings some Trading Card Game sensibilities to a more conventional "complete game in a box" format. The game comes with an array of cards, multiple copies of lots of different things. There are three denominations of "money" used in the game, three denominations of victory points, and 25 different "action" cards (these would be the TCG-like cards) that spice things up and give it variety. Any given game uses all the money and points, but uses only 10 of the 25 different action cards. You can pick what you want, decide randomly which to use, draft, read about particular combinations online that other gamers have liked, whatever. The various combinations lead to a broad variety of ways the game can unfold. All the cards have different "purchase prices" during the game, according to how powerful they are.

Each player begins with his own personal deck of just 10 cards -- 7 of the weakest money, 3 of the weakest points. Each then draws a hand of 5 cards from that deck. On your turn, you show all the money you have in your hand, and use that total to buy one card from the different stacks you have arrayed before you. You could buy more valuable money, victory points, or one of the action cards. Whatever you purchase goes to your discard pile, where (as soon as you exhaust your deck) it will soon be reshuffled to become part of your deck (and thus, your strategy) as the game unfolds. If you draw any of those special action cards, you're allowed to play one before spending the rest of the money in your hand. When the game ends, the player who has acquired the highest total number of victory points in his deck wins.

The game is pretty fun to play and goes at a relatively fast pace. Exactly how fast can depend a great deal on which actions your group chooses to use in a given game. Strategically, I'd say our group is still working through what exactly works. There's been some research online for this one, where you can readily find some very vocal gamers claiming to have found "this killer strategy that always works." That in turn is being denounced by other gamers claiming, "yeah, my group was stuck there for a while, until we figured out you can do this instead."

In short, it's very much the "metagame" dynamic of a trading card game, where strategies ebb and flow over time.

I don't think I've played enough yet to weigh in on whether any particular "killer strategy" is really that unbeatable, but it seems like even if there were a single best way to go, it could be thwarted by the selection of the right action cards for a game. So I don't think I can put forth whether the game is flawed on that level.

But I can and will say that it is flawed on another level: one of the very things that makes it clever is also a bit annoying. Remember I said you build your deck as the game is played, starting with a small pile of 10 cards. It's not easy to shuffle 10 cards. You can't riffle them. You have to "wash" the cards to get any kind of randomness, and you have to do this for many, many "trips" through your deck before you actually get enough cards to start doing a conventional shuffle. And even once you reach that point, you end up shuffling a lot.

To give you some idea how much you're shuffling these cards, remember that you start with 10 in your deck. It seems from my experience that by the end of a typical game, you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 55. And you're acquiring these cards basically 1 or 2 at a time every time it's your turn, using a hand of 5 (or more) cards every turn, and shuffling every time you exhaust the deck. I could run some math on this, but it's late and my brain hurts -- I ballpark it that you have to shuffle your deck between 15 and 25 times in the average game of Dominion.

This is time-consuming. Sometimes you feel like you spend more time shuffling than actually playing. And it abuses the poor cards. When I played with my friend's copy last night -- a copy of the game barely a week old and with maybe 10 plays on it at most, there were a few cards that were visibly worn. Play this game at all regularly, and I believe you'll be needing to buy a replacement set in fairly short order.

I suppose time will tell if the game is enjoyable enough to get over the shuffling hurdle, but for the moment my opinion is still somewhat mixed. Forced to rate it today, I'd give Dominion a B-. But that's still a good enough opinion that I'll certainly play it when someone suggests it, which I think is likely to happen a bunch in my play group.

So we'll see how that opinion develops...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That game left me cold (much like Race for the Galaxy).
Here's what I wrote on BoardGameGeek a little over a month ago:

"I just played my first few games of Dominion.
The "build your deck as you go" idea is an impressive one. I love to see my deck grow over time, bringing with it more possibilities and also more and more "dead" cards that I'd rather not see in there anymore.
I love the balancing act each player has to perform to get enough victory points but not too early, otherwise they'll keep popping up in drawn cards and clog hands.

But at the end of the day, the gameplay is pretty thin on this one.

Draw cards, then play cards in the hopes of possibly drawing more cards and playing more cards. Some of those cards will let you acquire additional cards that let you draw more cards and play more cards. You can also get money to, well, get money and/or more cards and victory points. Of those cards that you buy with money, some will let you draw more cards, or play more cards, or get victory points...

The matrix is incredibly narrow, here. I found myself doing the same couple of things over and over and over again. The deck-building machine is fun to observe in action for a while, but then the novelty wears off very quickly. And what's left?

I want something like a Winter card in each deck and Food cards that I have to make sure I play in front of me (and that stay there) before the Winter card pops out of my deck and forces me to burn through my resources.
I want something like guards I have to build up to defend against invasions from other players.
I want mystery cards I'm not sure my opponents have in their decks.
I want to be able to steal cards from my opponent's deck (come on, make use of the fact that it's NOT an actual CCG and that all the cards belong to the owner of the game -- tracking ownership is unimportant here).
I want to be able to *insert* cards in my opponent's deck: booby traps, lies, schemes. (Curse cards are a pale shadow of what a real "bobby trap" mechanic could be.)
I want to build alliances with other players and make some of our cards work together.
I want to lock down a category of cards for a turn.
I want to work toward bringing a new category of cards into the game from what was left in the box.
I want to sell cards from my own deck to my opponents -- and buy cards from *their* decks.
I want to race my opponent toward an intermediate goal that grants a major benefit (at a price!) for the rest of the game.

This is just off the top of my head, as fast as I can type.
And all of this could exist within a 30-minute game.

There's so much more that this game could be. The engine is extremely cool, but there's no fuel in it.
And as a result, I'm left pretty unsatisfied.

Sure, there'll be expansions. Yeah, yeah. But I can't help but feel that I've been sold the empty shell of what could be a great game."

FKL