Dominion (game)
The box cover of Dominion
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| Designer(s) | Donald X. Vaccarino |
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| Publisher(s) | Rio Grande Games |
| Players | 2 to 4 (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion) |
| Age range | 10 and up |
| Setup time | 5–10 minutes |
| Playing time | ~30 minutes |
| Random chance | Medium |
| Skill(s) required | Resource management, Planning |
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. Vaccarino, however, denies that Magic was the inspiration). 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".
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. 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.
Dominion is a deck-building card game in which two to four players compete to gather the most valuable deck of cards. The game features fourteen types of cards, the main four being:
Some cards feature additional type designations. 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.
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.
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