LogFAQs > #898142793

Another one of my favorite parts of Dominion (which also makes it more strategic) - the fact that victory point cards count against you. It's so fucking brilliant. Yeah, you could buy an Estate every turn (and just one! - you only have one Buy per turn just like you only have one Action!)... but soon your deck will be fat as fuck and you'll be drawing so many Estates instead of gold that you can't even afford to buy more Estates! And then your opponents will hum along to victory with the Provinces.

The game often ends with a race to get the largest share of Provinces at the end of the game. And this is it. It's like entering a tournament after you've built your Magic: The Gathering deck or something. It's where you prove your engine works, and that you built it fast enough. And if the game is closely contested - it is thrilling.

Enjoyment - I first learned Dominion online, pre-dating board games as a hobby. The computer was surprisingly competent at showing me solid basic strategies, but it's mechanically satisfying for all the right reasons, and it took care of all of the accounting that you need to do in person. Getting to a competent enough point to beat the computer regularly was really fun. But the expansions weren't free, so I'd only get to play them against my friend, who'd kick my ass every time as I was only used to playing with Smithys and the like.

The free online game support for Dominion dropped a lot after a year or so, but I played the hell out of the game while I could, including against the friend who got us into 'the hobby' later. I've only played the physical game about twice - once with four players with the base game only, and once with one expansion.

There are two instances where I felt like I did something insanely cool. The first is when I aped the PC's strategy and got a victory by purchasing the Garden VP cards instead of the usual Provinces race. It actually worked to beat other people, and I felt like a fucking genius even though I only learned it by getting my ass kicked against a computer. The other was when one time I discovered this card that (pretty much unassisted) let me shuffle my deck or draw it all or something. It felt kind of broken, and I forget what it is, but it was satisfying.

Future - It's hard to disentangle my high ranking of Dominion with the fact it was one of the only hobby games I played for a year. The last time I played it, in person, it was just a game. A nice one, but just a game that required a lot of reading. I'm interested in recapturing the magic and won't say no to a (4-person or smaller) game with interesting expansions, but I can't really imagine myself learning the cards well enough to get good anymore. Which means this is at least partially a legacy ranking.

Bonus question - What is your favorite game from the deck-building genre? What is your opinion of the genre?

Hint for #14 - where smashing face never feels personal
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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