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chrisls's Dominion (Other)
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| [February 11, 2015 02:10:36 AM]
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I played two rounds of Dominion, a card game that revolves around each player continuously constructing their own deck throughout the game. The game has four different types of cards: victory cards, curse cards, treasure cards, and kingdom cards. Victory cards have a number that represents an amount of “victory points”, which are totaled at the end to determine the winner of the game. However, a player can not utilize these cards in any meaningful way during the main segment of the game. Curse cards have a number that represents a negative amount of victory points, and are distributed to other players via certain offensive cards such as the “Witch” card. Treasure cards have a number that represents an in-game currency of sorts. These cards are used to purchase other cards to add to a player’s deck. Kingdom cards (sometimes called action cards) have printed effects and instructions that occur when that card is played.
The game is setup by placing the cards in a sorted manner face-up. The amount of treasure cards and victory cards used in a game is determined by the amount of people playing the game. However, there will always be 10 sets of different kingdom cards in a game, but the different subclasses of kingdom cards included can vary depending on player preference and expansion sets used. After the card stacks are set up, each player takes 7 of the 1-point treasure cards (called “copper”) and 3 of the 1-point victory cards (called “estate”) and shuffles these together to form their starting deck. Each player then draws 5 cards as their starting hand and the game begins.
The turn-by-turn gameplay itself is actually extremely simple and in a lot of game sessions should be fairly fast-paced. On a player’s turn that player does the following in this exact order:
-Optionally plays one kingdom card from their hand.
-Buys one card with the gold from their hand.
-Discards all cards and draws five new cards from the deck. If the deck becomes depleted, the discard stack is shuffled and becomes the new deck.
(These rules may be slightly altered by certain kingdom cards that grant additional draws, buys, and actions.)
This continues until either the 6 point victory card (“Province”) stack is depleted, or three of any of the stacks are depleted. When the game ends, the amount of victory points each player has is tallied up, and the player with the most points wins.
For the two play sessions I discuss in this report, I used a web based-service called Dominion Online to play the game, as I did not have access to the physical game. Without paying extra, this digital version is identical to the physical core game and is played with other real people. Because the game is fast-paced and does not have any sort of diplomacy mechanics, very little is lost in translation from the physical to digital version of the game.
For my first play session, I played a 1-on-1 matchup with a randomized assortment of cards from the basic game set. This assortment of cards only contained one offensive card – the thief, and therefore had no cards that made use of the curse card type. The game also had the moat card, which allows a player to counter the thief. Because of this, neither me nor the other player ever added a thief to our deck, so the gameplay remained purely focused on deck-building throughout the session. When no offensive cards are utilized in the game, the only way in which one player can directly affect the other player’s decisions is by depleting a resource, which disallows both players from gaining that type of card. The strategy I used consisted of buying the 2-valued treasure cards (“silver”) for my first few turns so I would be able to get some higher-valued kingdom cards early on. This game proceeded fairly generically with both my opponent and I using similar middle and late-game strategies. However, when the time came to start focusing on buying victory cards, my deck had trouble yielding enough gold per turn to purchase the 6-value victory cards as often as my opponent, and he/she ended up winning by 10 points at the end of the game. I believe this was primarily due to my opponent executing a better strategy during the middle of the game. However, the game was close enough where the random nature of drawing cards from a deck was partially responsible for my loss.
For the next play session, I joined someone else’s game instead of hosting my own. Because of this, I played a match against a player that had purchased some of the expansion sets, and we therefore played with cards in the game that I had never seen before, as my previous experience with the physical version of the game did not include any of the expansion sets. These cards offered a variety of ways to combine their effects to increase a player’s number of draws, actions, and buys per turn. In addition, there was an offensive card that forced the opponent to add a curse card to their deck. Because of these factors, this match seemed to have a lot more focus on strategy and the outcome was not as luck-based as the first matchup (because I was beat very badly). Resource management was a lot more important in this match as well, as there were two cards that were key pieces to pulling off a lot of the better combinations, and therefore were getting depleted quickly. Because I had never played with a few of the cards from the expansion set used in this match and was unfamiliar with the strategies and possible combos, my opponent was able to dish out a lot of curse cards to me early on without me having a counter-strategy, which not only hurt my score but also affected the usefulness of my hands. My opponent was also able to collect most of the 6-point victory cards torwards the end of the game, and, therefore, ended up beating me by a very comfortable margin.
I overall found these two matches to be very enjoyable experiences, but that is very much influenced by the fact that I have played Dominion in the past, and, therefore, am not overwhelmed by the rules or style of the game. I did not enjoy these matches as much as I have enjoyed previous matches, however, because I typically enjoy playing games more casually, and my more fond experiences with Dominion were with 4-player games with people with similar experience and skill levels as me.
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chrisls's Dominion (Other)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 11 February, 2015
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