Dominion (card game)

Dominion is a deck-building game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Each player uses a separate deck of cards; players draw their hands from their own decks, not others'. Players use their cards to perform actions and buy cards from a common pool of card stacks, including Action, Treasure, and Victory cards. The player with the most victory points wins. The game has a light medieval theme, with card names that reference pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures.

Some have drawn parallels with collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering.^[1] Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration.^[2] Unlike Magic: The Gathering, Dominion players build their decks ad hoc as the game proceeds. Dominion is the first game of its kind and has spawned a genre of similar card-based games dubbed "deck-building games".^[1]

The game was released at Spiel 2008 in multiple languages and voted best game of the fair by the Fairplay polls with a rating of 1.75 from 147 votes.^[3] 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. By 2016, more than 2.5 million copies of it and its expansions had been sold worldwide.

Gameplay

Dominion is a deck-building card game in which two to four players compete to gather the most valuable deck of cards. Cards are classified into several "types", including:

• Victory cards have a Victory Point value but usually have no use during the game.
• Curse cards are like Victory cards but have a negative Victory Point value.
• Treasure cards generate Coins which can be used to buy other cards during the Buy phase.
• Action cards generate effects during a player's Action phase. Some of these effects might include drawing more cards; generating Coins, Buys, or Actions; gaining or getting rid of cards; or affecting other players.

Some cards feature additional type designations. For example, Attack cards hurt other players, such as forcing them to discard cards from their hand or gain Curse cards. Reaction cards can be triggered out of turn in response to a certain event, such as other players' Attacks.

A game of Dominion in progress at the 2011 PAX East exposition

The game is always set up with the same seven stacks of basic cards; three stacks of Victory cards, one stack of Curse cards, and three stacks of Treasure cards. In addition, ten stacks of Kingdom cards (typically Action cards) are added to the table. The Kingdom cards can be either selected by the players or chosen randomly. Certain Kingdom cards from the game's expansions might require additional stacks, such as the Potion card (a Treasure card) from the Alchemy expansion. These piles represent the finite Supply of cards. Finally, each player receives the same starting deck of ten cards, consisting of seven basic Treasure cards and usually three basic Victory cards. Each player shuffles their deck and draws the top five cards to form their hand.

Each turn, the player gains one Action and one Buy, and performs the following phases in order (abbreviated as "ABC" as a mnemonic for newer players):

• Action phase: The player can play one Action card for each Action they have, and follow the card's printed instructions. Some Action cards generate additional Actions, which means that the player can play more Action cards that same turn. Action cards may also generate additional Buys and Coins for subsequent phases in the turn, or have the player draw additional cards.
• Buy phase: The player can play any Treasure cards they want from their hand, generating Coins. Then for every Buy they have, they may use the Coins they have generated in their Action phase and Buy phase to buy a card from the Supply; if the player has no Coins, they may still buy a card with a zero Coin cost. Bought cards are added to the player's discard pile (from which they will later be shuffled into their deck).
• Clean-up phase: The player collects their hand and all played cards and places those into their discard pile. They then draw five new cards from their deck. Unused Actions, Buys, and Coins do not carry over to future turns.

If the player must draw a card from their deck, but their deck is empty, they shuffle their discard pile to create a new deck. Some Action cards can trash cards, removing them from players' decks and into the "trash", where they are out of the game unless certain actions from the Dark Ages expansion are used to recover them.

The game ends under two conditions: when the stack of Province cards (the highest-value Victory card in the base game) has been exhausted, or when any three other stacks in the Supply have been exhausted. Players then count the number of Victory Points in their decks, and the player with the highest score wins. Other end-game conditions have been introduced in the game's expansions.

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. Usually, the game's main strategy is to build a deck that maximizes the player's ability to draw hands with 8 coins. This allows the player to buy a Province card, the highest value Victory card in the base game. Players must balance effective deck building to reach this coin goal with the acquisition of Victory cards to win the game; most Victory cards have no value during most of the game and dilute a player's deck of Treasure and Action cards.^[4]

History

Vaccarino was a video game programmer and developer in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s. He spent time playing new German-style board games, prior to the release of Magic: The Gathering in 1993.^[5] His interest in Magic sparked his own development of a 90-card fan-made extension for the game, Edge of the World, and he became an informal contributor towards additional Magic works. He is credited in the official Magic rulebook. He developed several game ideas in the intervening years and discussed them with Magic's creator, Richard Garfield.^[1]

In 2006, Vaccarino invented the deck-building mechanic while working on a fantasy adventure card game called "Spirit Warriors II".^[6] He struggled with the mechanics of the game before a deadline of showing the game to his local gaming group, and spent one weekend to strip down the game to its core elements; specifically, having problems with the concept of introducing cards that could be acquired over time, Vaccarino instead opted to simply have all such cards available at the start of the game.^[5] Vaccarino introduced the game to his local gaming group at a gaming store; the game immediately became popular, overshadowing the usual staples including Magic over the next two years.^[5]

With the success of the game with his local group, Vaccarino began looking to refine and publish the game. During the 2007 Origins Game Fair, Vaccarino demonstrated the game and gained the interest of Rio Grande Games.^[7] Shortly after being signed on with Rio Grande, BoardGameGeek's columnists Valerie Putman and Dale Yu requested Rio Grande to allow them to develop the game. During development, Dominion was called "Castle Builder", due to its theme of building rooms in a castle, and then, later, "Game X"; Yu is credited with the final name of Dominion.^[7][8] Vaccarino had planned early on for the game to grow through expansions, though focused these on maintaining the core functionality of the game instead of immediately adding "exotic things"; this was to ensure that, if the game did take off, early expansions would not create two disparate sets of cards, one focused on the normal Dominion play, and a second with a strange new mechanic.^[9] In a post to BoardGameGeek, Vaccarino suggested that he had originally planned seven different expansions from the start,^[1] and in fact, in tuning the core game for release, took cards originally planned for later expansions into the base game.^[10]

In 2016, Rio Grande Games announced a Second Edition for the base set of Dominion and its first expansion, Intrigue, featuring the removal of 6 cards from each set, replaced by 7 new cards each, as well as updating the layout and wording of all cards.

Dominion has been translated into 18 languages (Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, bokmål Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish), comprising 6 different alphabets.

Releases

Numerous expansions have been released for "Dominion", which include standalone sets that do not require the core game, and expansions that require the core game or one of the standalone sets.^[11] "Standalone" means that the set comes with the basic cards required to play: Estates, Duchies, Provinces, Coppers, Silvers, Golds, Curses, and a Trash card.

Vaccarino originally planned to stop expanding the game after Guilds, though he conceded:^[15]

"Still, it’s likely that at some point the publishers will want another expansion and, well, I like to be friendly. So I can’t guarantee that Guilds is the end of the line, but you can at least think of it as a dividing point between regular expansions and occasional expansions."

Since then, the sets Adventures and Empires were released, as well as the promotional cards Prince, Summon and Sauna+Avanto, as well as 14 new cards for the second edition of Dominion and Intrigue.

Promotional cards

Mini-expansions, most consisting of a set of a single kind of Kingdom card, have been released as promotional items:

• Dominion: Envoy (Nov. 2008)^[16][17]
• Dominion: Black Market (March 2009)^[18]
• Dominion: Stash (Feb. 2010)^[19]
• Dominion: Walled Village (June 2011)^[20]
• Dominion: Governor (Oct. 2011)^[21]
• Dominion: Prince (June 2014)^[22]
• Event: Summon (autumn 2015)
• Split pile: Sauna + Avanto (September 2016)

Big Box Compilations

• Dominion Big Box (2010) - Contains Dominion (2008), Alchemy (2010), Prosperity (2010), and 2 promotional cards: Envoy and Black Market. Later editions included alternate promotional cards: Walled Village and Governor.
• Dominion Big Box II (2016) - Contains Dominion Second Edition (2016) and Dominion: Intrigue Second Edition (2016) and additional base cards for 5 and 6 player games.

Online play

A licensed browser-based online implementation of Dominion, hosted by Goko, went live in early March 2013. It was originally intended to be released to the public on August 16, 2012, but because of bugs and server overload, it was withdrawn from public release and returned to beta testing.^[23] The official app provided the base Dominion game free to play, and cards from the expansions available for a fee.^[24]

Several unofficial online implementations of Dominion existed prior to the official launch of Goko's implementation; Rio Grande Games requested that these unofficial Dominion implementations be discontinued once the official online implementation was released.^[25] One of these unofficial implementations, however, located at dominion.isotropic.org, was used by Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino and his playtesters during the development of new cards, even long after the site was closed to the public.

As of October 2015, the official Goko online implementation of Dominion had transitioned to a new official 2.0 online implementation developed by Making Fun.^[26] Making Fun honored all purchases made by customers from the original Goko implementation.

In February 2016, John Welch, CEO of Making Fun announced^[27] that the license granted to Making Fun by Rio Grande Games to develop the official online Dominion game would expire at the end of 2016, and would not be renewed with Making Fun.

From January 1st, 2017, development of the official online Dominion game is licensed to Shuffle iT and is available here.

Outsourcing storage

Since the game and its expansions feature over 3000 cards, Rio Grande Games has licensed manufacturers' creation of containers to store all the cards into one or two boxes.^[28]

Awards

• 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
• 2009 BoardGamer.ru (Russia), Best Card Game of the Year
• 2009 Boughtalot.ru, best game of the year

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dominion.

• Rio Grande Games' Dominion homepage
• Dominion at BoardGameGeek
• Strategy Wiki
• Dominion Online powered by Shuffle iT