Dominion (card game)

Dominion

The box cover of Dominion
Designers	Donald X. Vaccarino
Publishers	Rio Grande Games
Players	2 to 4 (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion)
Setup time	5–10 minutes
Playing time	~30 minutes
Chance	Low
Age range	10 and up
Skills	Resource management

Dominion is a designer card game created by Donald X. Vaccarino, and published by Rio Grande Games. The game was released at Spiel 2008 in multiple languages. It was voted the best game of the fair by the Fairplay polls^[1] with a rating of 1.75 from 147 votes. Within two months of its release, Dominion was one of the top ten games according to BoardGameGeek ratings.^[2] In 2009, it won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis awards. It was one of five winning games in American Mensa's 2009 MindGame competition.

Dominion is a deck-building^[3] card game in which the players compete to gather the most valuable deck of cards, representing a Kingdom. There are five main classes of cards:

• Victory cards, which have a Victory Point value that is tallied at the end of the game, but generally have no value during the game.
• Curse cards, which are like Victory cards, but have a negative Victory Point value that counts against the player at the end of the game.
• Treasure cards, played during the Buy Phase, which generate Coins (and sometimes have other effects).
• Action cards generate effects during a player's turn, allowing that player to gain more cards, Coins, Buys, Actions, or get rid of cards, or may affect other players in the game. Action cards have further subtypes: Attack, which negatively affects other players; and Duration, which affects future turns by the player.
• Reaction cards, used in response to some event, for example Attacks; these are the only type of card that can be used out of turn.

Some cards share multiple types.

The game is set up with three stacks of different Victory cards, one stack of Curse cards, three stacks of Treasure cards, and ten stacks of other Kingdom cards, either pre-selected by the players or chosen randomly. Depending on which Kingdom cards are used, other card stacks may be brought into play. For example, the Alchemy expansion introduces a Treasure card called a Potion, which may be part of the cost of a Kingdom card from that set; if such cards are in play, a stack of Potions is added to the initial tableau, otherwise they are unused. The number of cards of each stack is set by the number of players present. Each player receives the same deck of ten cards, consisting of the lowest value Treasure and Victory cards, and randomly draws five cards to start the game.

Each turn, the player performs the following phases (abbreviated as "ABC" to help new players remember the order)

• Action phase: The player starts with 1 Action during this phase, which with they may play one Action card, following its instructions. As some Action cards generate more Actions, the player can chain several Action cards together to boost the number of Coins, Buys, or other benefits. Remaining Actions do not carry over into the next turn.
• Buy phase: The player starts with 1 Buy during this phase, plus any Buys from the Action phase. The player can use any Treasure cards in their hand to generate Coins in addition to those earned during the Action phase, and with each Buy, can purchase one card from the remaining stacks for the price in Coin noted in the bottom left of each card. The player does not need to use their Buys, nor spend all their Coins, but unused Buys and Coins do not carry over.
• Cleanup phase: The player collects their hand and all played and bought cards and places those into their discard pile. The player then draws five new cards from his deck.

If at any time the player must draw from an empty deck, the player shuffles their existing discard pile and uses it as the deck. Some Action cards require players to remove a card from the game; these cards are not re-added to the player's deck when it is shuffled nor counted at the end of the game unless specified.

The game is over under two conditions: when the highest value Victory card stack (the Province cards in the base game) has been exhausted, or when any three other stacks have been exhausted. At that time, the players count the number of Victory Points in their complete deck, and the player with the highest score is the winner.

The game has been compared to the "draft" gameplay style of collectible card games where players vie for the best deck from a common pool of cards. The game's main strategy is to strive to have hands that provide 8 coins for which to purchase a Province card; this often results from creating Action card chains, using cards that grant additional actions and benefits to build one's available coins to 8 or more. The game's strategy is also one where the players must balance effective deck building to reach this coin goal with the acquisition of Victory cards to win the game; Victory cards have little value during most of the game, and dilute a player's deck of Treasure and Action cards.^[4]

During development, Dominion was originally called "Castle Builder" and then, later, "Game X".^[5][6]

Mini-expansions consisting of a set of a single card type have been released as promotional items.

• Dominion: Black Market (2009)
• Dominion: Envoy (2009)
• Dominion: Stash (2010)
• Dominion: Walled Village (2011) (Due for release at GenCon & Origins 2011, then later to retailers) ^[7]

• 2008 Meeples Choice Awards
• 2009 Spiel des Jahres
• 2009 Deutscher Spiele Preis
• 2009 Mensa Select
• 2009 Golden Geek Award (Game of the Year & Card Game of the Year)
• 2009 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming
• 2009 Origins Award, best card game of the year

• Rio Grande Games' Dominion homepage
• Dominion at BoardGameGeek
• Dominion video review "Dicetower"
• Dominion strategy blog "Dominion Strategy"
• Dominion strategy tips "www.play-board-games.com"