Dominion

After playing Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and San Juan, Cari and I were ready for another game to try.  She headed over to the game store to ask their opinion and I headed over to my computer chair to check out boardgamegeek.com.   We both came up with the same answer.

Dominion.

At first, I wasn't too excited about it.  It's a card game and it didn't seem that interesting when I first read about it.  I watched a few video reviews on YouTube with Cari and my interest picked up a bit.  When Cari's birthday came up, her sister Amanda sent us (Cari) the game.

The game is very easy to learn.  There aren't any complicated rules to follow.  One reviewer even said that if you can count to five, you can play this game. We're going to try and teach the kids next week, and if I'm wrong about the complexity, I'll let you know.

In the game, there are three values of money cards, three values of victory point cards, and then around twenty five action cards.  In each game you choose ten of the action cards to use and put the others back in the box.  The action cards will change the way the game plays a lot so there is always a variety to the way you play.   Your goal is to have the most victory points in your hand by the end of the game.  Some board games take over an hour to complete, but Dominion takes roughly thirty minutes to complete.

I'm going to try and keep this short and simple, but here's a brief explanation of game play.  Each player starts out with seven "dollars" and three victory points.  Ten cards.  You shuffle your cards and then deal yourself five. On your turn, you will play an action card that you may have dealt yourself, make a purchase, discard those cards, and deal yourself five more cards.  As you go through your deck of cards, you shuffle your discards and deal five more.  You use the money in your hand each round to purchase action cards - which may allow you to draw more cards, spend more money, or use additional action cards - or purchase more money or victory cards.  You are making purchases of more cards just about every turn.  Your deck of cards may contain fifty cards by the end of the game.

Because you are constantly cycling through the cards you are buying, this becomes an important strategy.  If you purchase a lot of victory points early in the game, they can tend to clog up your hand, as they are useless during the game.  This results in you having a lot of meaningless turns while your opponents (up to four players in a game) are building up more money for later in the game.

It didn't take long for us to get the hang of how this game works and we have really started developing our own strategies.  After I played the game, my initial concerns were gone and I was hooked.  There is a reason that it is ranked high among gaming geeks!

This game is already ranked high on our list of games we love and we're excited to try it with a few more players.  If you have any interest in playing board games and card games, this is one that we highly recommend.  Thanks again to Amanda for sending us (Cari) a great game.  Are you willing to learn it too?