Ever since I first learned to play Magic: The Gathering more than ten years ago, I’ve been a big fan of card-based games. Using cards allows games to get away with a relatively simple core ruleset while adding additional rules and exceptions to the established rules as needed on the cards themselves. This means that while a good player will need to have knowledge of all of the cards and their possible effects, a beginner can start with just the core rules and add to his or her knowledge by reading the cards as they’re played. With a large enough library of cards, you get unparalleled dynamism from all the different card interactions, including many even the original designers didn’t predict, and hence a continuously fresh experience.

One of the things that I’ve always admired about Magic is the abundance of what I like to call meta-cards in the game. Most of the cards in Magic represent summonable creatures, castable sorceries, forgeable artifacts and all of the other accouterments that one would expect in a game depicting a duel between powerful mages, but the meta-cards are none of these. Instead, these cards have effects that manipulate the deck itself, allowing the user to among other things, draw additional cards, retrieve cards that have been discarded, and even go looking into their library for specific cards to put into their hand.

So this is part of why I love Dominion so much. Pretty much all of the cards in this game are meta-cards. What’s more, in Dominion, decks are constructed on-the-fly over the course of the game, which has got to blow the mind of any Magic-player. From what I can tell, Dominion is resented by a contingent on BGG because of its high placement on the site’s rankings while being a “boardgame” that has no board. Instead, the only thing you get when you crack open the box are cards and more cards. Personally, I do agree that it’s a bit too expensive for what it offers but I admire its clever design enough not to kick up too much of a fuss over it.

Every game of Dominion uses the core cards for money and victory points, but only 10 out of the 25 Kingdom cards are available in a game. Each player starts off with a deck consisting of seven Copper cards and three Estate cards and draws five cards out of his or deck to form a hand. During their turn, each player then plays Kingdom and money cards as appropriate to purchase additional cards to add to their decks. When either the Province victory cards have all been purchased or any four other stacks have been exhausted, the game ends and the player whose deck contains the most victory points is declared the winner.

The key to understanding Dominion is that while you want to have as many victory points as you can in your deck to win the game, actually drawing such a card into your hand is bad because they’re not worth any money and can’t be played for any effects. In a typical game, you spend the early game optimizing your deck by stacking it with good Kingdom cards and high value Silver and Gold cards while trashing out the low value Copper and Estate cards. Then in the end game you deploy the power of your deck to buy up the high victory point but expensive Province cards as fast as possible.

As such, all of the gameplay in Dominion lies in deciding which combination of Kingdom cards to buy from those available to create what you think is the best possible deck. Such cards include Cellar, which gives +1 Action, meaning you can play another Kingdom card after playing it and allows you to discard any number of cards from your hand to draw the same number of cards; Militia which provides +2 coins for purchasing cards and also forces all other players to discard down to three cards unless they hold a Moat; and Throne Room, which works with another Kingdom card in your hand by allowing it to take effect twice.

The most common complaint about Dominion is that it is the very paragon of a multiplayer solitaire game since everyone just works on building their own decks. While some cards, such as the aforementioned Militia, does allow you to affect your opponents, the interaction is very dispassionate and impersonal. In fact, most of the time each player does his or her own thing, mumbling the names of the cards they play while other players concentrate on planning what they want to do next.

After some additional plays, I believe that there is interaction in Dominion, but of the more subtle sort. For example, there’s always a temptation in Dominion to delay buying victory point cards in order to spend more time optimizing your deck but if your opponent starts buying those cards early you might be forced to change tack and settle for a less efficient build in order not to be left too far behind. Similarly, while most of the time games end due to the Province cards running out, the secondary condition of any other four stacks being exhausted comes up often enough that you need to be ready to grab even the lowly Estate and Duchy cards.

Since a game of Dominion takes only about 30 to 45 minutes, this puts it squarely into filler territory. This is no bad thing of course and personally I find it more feasible to play smaller games like this at home with my wife and go to CarcaSean in order to play the meatier ones. My one big complaint is that the game’s theme makes absolutely no sense. If anyone can feel like they’re really building up a kingdom over the course of a game, I salute their imagination. In my case, the only thing I see is abstract card manipulation for its own sake.

Finally, there’s no way Dominion can compete with the richness of a real CCG like Magic. The basic game after all only contains 25 unique Kingdom cards while a typical standalone edition of Magic contains well over 200 unique spells. Still, it’s a self-contained package and works well at what it tries to do, namely capture some of the deckbuilding fun of CCGs in a series of relatively short sessions without having to worry about collecting many different cards. Indeed, the real fun is in building the deck rather than actually playing it, which makes Dominion a rather nifty game.