Dominion (card game)


Dominion is a deck-building card game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Each player uses a separate deck of cards and draw their hands from their own decks, not those of others. Players use the cards in their hands to either perform actions or buy select cards from a common pool of card stacks. The player with the most victory points at the end wins. The game has a "light" medieval theme, with card names that reference pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures.
Regarding the feel of the game, parallels are often drawn with collectible card games such as the popular . Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration. Unlike that game, players of Dominion build their decks ad hoc as the game proceeds, rather than coming to the table with a pre-made deck. Dominion was the first game of its kind, but has spawned a whole genre of similar card-based games dubbed "deck-building games".
When the game was publicly released at Spiel 2008 in Essen, Germany, in multiple languages, it was voted "best game of the fair" by the Fairplay polls. The next year, 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.
The success of the game has led to a plethora of expansions. By 2016, more than 2.5 million copies of Dominion and its many expansions had been sold worldwide. As of March 2020, expansions were still being published, thus also contributing to its Magic-like feel, since Magic also regularly releases expansion sets. Unlike Magic, Dominion is not a TCG; each player starts with the same card pool, instead of their own decks, with cards they own. Other notable differences exist between Dominion and other similar card games.

Gameplay

Dominion is a deck-building card game in which two to four players compete to gather the most valuable deck of cards. 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.
Cards are classified into several "types", including:
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.
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 are added to the table. The Kingdom cards can be either selected by the players or chosen randomly. Kingdom Card piles, in addition to the base card piles, represent the finite Supply of cards. Certain Kingdom cards from the game's expansions might require additional stacks of cards to be added to the Supply, or accessories such as tokens to be available to players.
Each player receives the same starting deck of ten cards, consisting usually of seven Copper cards and three Estate 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 :
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.
The game ends under one of two conditions: when the stack of Province cards has been exhausted, or when any three 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.
Since possessing Victory cards is necessary to win the game, but they usually have no value during gameplay itself, players must balance the acquisition of Victory cards with useful Action and Treasure cards that maintain the player's ability to play effective turns. Usually, the game's main strategy is to build a deck that maximizes the player's ability to draw hands that can buy the Province card.

History

Vaccarino was a software developer in the 1980s and 1990s. He spent time playing hobbyist board games prior to the release of Magic: The Gathering in 1993. 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 Magics creator, Richard Garfield.
In 2006, Vaccarino invented the deck-building mechanic while working on a fantasy adventure card game called "Spirit Warriors II". He struggled with the mechanics of the game before a deadline of showing the game to his local gaming group, and spent one weekend stripping 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. Vaccarino then 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.
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. Shortly after being signed on with Rio Grande, BoardGameGeek's columnists Valerie Putman and Dale Yu requested permission from Rio Grande to develop the game. During development, Dominion was called "Castle Builder", owing to its theme of building rooms in a castle, and then, later, "Game X". Yu is credited with the final name of Dominion. Vaccarino had, early on, planned 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 incompatible sets of cards: one focused on the normal Dominion play, and others with a strange new mechanic. In a post to BoardGameGeek, Vaccarino suggested that he had originally planned seven different expansions from the start, and in fact, in tuning the core game for release, brought cards into the base game that were originally planned for later expansions.
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, 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. "Standalone" means that the set comes with the basic cards required to play: Estates, Duchies, Provinces, Coppers, Silvers, Golds, Curses, and a Trash card.
NameRe­lease DateTypeCardsKing­dom Card PilesTheme
Dominion October 2008 / October 2016 Standalone50025 / 26 The original game. Relatively simple cards.
IntrigueJuly 2009 /October 2016 Standalone / Expansion 500 / 300 25 / 26 Decisions among multiple possible effects. Hybrid cards that are both Victory cards and another type.
SeasideOctober 2009Expansion30026Duration cards. Mats where cards are set aside and re-added to the deck at the end of the game.
AlchemyMay 2010Expansion15012The Potion Treasure as an alternate card cost, with cards that require a Potion as well as Coin to be bought.
ProsperityOctober 2010Expansion30025Expensive cards and Treasures that do something when played in the Buy phase. Higher-value basic Treasure and Victory cards. Victory Point tokens.
CornucopiaJune 2011Expansion15013Cards that are more useful when there is variety in the player's deck.
HinterlandsOctober 2011Expansion30026Cards that have an additional effect when bought or otherwise gained.
Base CardsJune 2012Replacement cards2500A set of all the basic cards—Treasures, Victory, and Curse cards—from the standalones and expansions with new design and different art. No Kingdom Cards.
Dark AgesAugust 2012Expansion50035Cards that have an additional effect when trashed. Cards that care about the Trash. Cards that upgrade themselves. Ways to upgrade other cards. Shelters, Ruins, Spoils, Looters.
GuildsJune 2013Expansion15013Coin tokens that can be saved to spend later. Cards you can get more out of by paying extra for them.
AdventuresApril 2015Expansion40030Reserve cards. Events. Traveller cards. Player-owned tokens that modify cards. More Duration cards, with some that stay in play indefinitely.
EmpiresJune 2016Expansion30024Debt tokens. Cards you can buy now and pay for later. Split piles where the supply of one card must be exhausted before the other half of the pile can be bought or gained. Landmarks, which add new ways to score. Duration cards, VP tokens, and Events return from previous sets.
NocturneNovember 2017Expansion50033A new type of cards, called Night cards, which are played in the Night Phase during a player's turn. Also adds in more non-supply cards that cannot be "bought" in the normal manner. Hexes and Boons, which aren't "Cards" or "Events" per se but have effects similar to events.
RenaissanceNovember 2018Expansion30025Tokens that let you save coins and actions for later, Projects that grant abilities, and Artifacts to fight over.
MenagerieMarch 2020Expansion40030Horses which can only be gained with certain cards, Exile mats which temporarily remove cards from your deck, Ways which give another option for you action cards, and Events return.

Vaccarino originally planned to stop expanding the game after Guilds, though he conceded:
Since then, 5 sets plus 21 new cards have been released.
After the release of Menagerie, Dominion has now 585 differently named cards. One of the major appeals of Dominion is its endless variety. No two games are the same. There are 366 different Kingdom Card piles. Since each game uses 10 Kingdom Card piles, there are now over 1.0E+19 possible unique game combinations.

Promotional cards

Mini-expansions, most consisting of a set of a single kind of Kingdom card, have been released as promotional items:
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. The official app provided the base Dominion game free to play, and cards from the expansions available for a fee.
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. One of these unofficial implementations, however, located at , 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. Making Fun honored all purchases made by customers from the original Goko implementation.
In February 2016, John Welch, CEO of Making Fun announced 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 1, 2017, development of the official online Dominion game, located at , is licensed to Shuffle iT.

Outsourcing storage

Since the game and its expansions feature over 4,000 cards, Rio Grande Games has licensed manufacturers' creation of containers to store all the cards into one or two boxes.

Awards