This Old Neon Forum

Some family is in town for the long weekend, and last night we had some folks over to play some board games. One of them was Dominion, a nice deck-builder for 2-4 players. It's a fairly simple game, probably lasting about 30-60 minutes depending on how many players know what they're doing. The thing I really liked about it is that no one feels like they're lagging behind or "trapped", even if they're losing. Each turn, you get to play out your actions, buys, etc. with little interference. It's also quite straightforward and easy to pick up, even though it may look complicated at first (with 15-20 piles of different kinds of cards).

There are a bunch of expansions, too, but we didn't use any of them last night. I'll probably be looking for my own copy of the game to play when different people come over.

I'm not a big fan of Dominion, but with the right people it can definitely be fun!

My problem with it is that it was played to death for a couple years at my office, and as a result whenever I would join an office game, having played perhaps a dozen times total, the cards would be randomized and the other three players already had strategies planned out and the outcome was more or less pre-determined against me (and arrived at within dozen turns or so).

The expansions I played do a few interesting things, but I would introduce them gradually to try to extend the life of the game somewhat.

Variants on the deck-building theme (Ascension being the biggest) aren't quite as off-putting to me as they're even less interactive and feel almost co-operative in some ways.

Hmm, maybe we should have a general board gaming topic...

I actually thought we had started a general board gaming thread here when we first started up, but I guess it never transitioned from VC-F. We have a number of boardgame geeks among us, so if you want to fire up a general thread, I'm sure it'll be an active topic.

Plans are actually to get a game going with friends tonight. Likely Ticket to Ride, but I might take Munchkin or Boss Monster with us for some giggles.

I played Dominion quite a bit.
Good: It's easy to learn, fairly flexible with lots of cards and add-ons, it is usually exciting as it is not always clear who is doing well.
Not so good: Once you figure it out, you can easily win against beginners (if you keep playing it with the same people, it isnt that much of a problem)

I played a few other deck builders (e.g. Thunderstone), this one is still my fav.