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...