LogFAQs > #898142790

15. Dominion
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion

Genre/mechanics: Deck-building, card game
Rules complexity: 3/10
Game length: 20-40 minutes
Player count: 2-4
Experience: 2-3 games in person, 50+ games online (2-4 players/vs the PC)
First played: 2014

Dominion invented the deck-building genre. On your turn, you draw five cards from your personal deck, which may be worth victory points, be able to be discarded for money, or be useful as an Action that can give you extra gold/cards/actions. Money is spent to buy more cards. Then you discard your entire hand and draw five new cards, shuffling your discard pile to form a new deck when you run dry.

Design - Okay, so Dominion was the first deck-builder, and as far as I can tell, I haven't played a better one yet. And part of it is because most of the tweaks they make to the formula are measurably worse.

Part of this is because Dominion is something of a eurogame at heart. There's randomness, but over the course of a dozen or two dozen times through your deck, you're not going to have shit sequencing every time. At some point you blame your strategy rather than the cards. But you can only be so confident in your strategy because you're able to execute it. Dominion has a static marketplace in the place of other deckbuilders' Splendor-esque ones.

Degenerate combos are often the goal of card games and engine-builders. Given that Dominion lets you cull and smoothen your deck as it goes, it's certainly no exception to this. However, it has an obstacle that you do need to play around - the action economy. Unless you play a card that explicitly allows you extra actions, you only get to play one action card in Dominion. This means you have to balance getting action cards against getting extra actions - or in some cases, simply forgoing the opportunity to get action cards. That means tougher decisions than the Ameritrash-y "always take the best available card" "strategy" in other games, and it's the reason why Dominion is by far the deepest, strategy-wise - any strategy you come up with has to be proven to be better than "Big Money" (which says that unless you know you're building something good, purchasing the best currency card available is probably your best course of action).
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness