I will be publishing my thoughts on design, as well as links to articles of interest, and documents concerning my private works. I will try and publish something every Thursday night. Anything I publish should be considered my intellectual property; if anyone has any professional interest in it, please respect the work that I've put into it, and contact me about any adaptation or publication of said works.
In order to have some actual content to this post, I will start by sharing some recent thoughts I've had about Dominion. I want to preface this, by stating that, whenever seeing a new system of any kind, I immediately try and design my own. I am also assuming that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the games I am talking about, or willing to familiarize themselves with the basics of said games.
Dominion is a great game. In it, you and the other players build a deck as you play, balancing economic cards to build your deck further, with victory point cards (which are useless in game, but the only thing that matters once the game is over).
I feel the most distinctive traits of Dominion (from a design standpoint, especially compared to other deck building games such as Tanto Cuore and Thunderstone) are as follows:
- It is one dimensional
This is an important distinction, and one that not everyone may realize. Ultimately, your objective for any given turn is to get as much money as possible, and buy the best card you can. That is the one dimension: money. However you end up trying to do this, gold at turn end is pretty much all that matters.
This is both a good and bad thing. It is primarily good because it helps your turns consistent. With only a single resource to manage, you do not have to luck out to get (for example) both a mineral and vespene gas card in your hand to get the unit you want. It allows you to rely less on chance when devising a strategy.
Thunderstone deviates from this, and ends up with wildly inconsistent turns as it has 3 resources: gold, attack power (both physical and magic), light. Note that I am not counting experience because it does not go in your deck. It weakens the game overall (by making it harder to have an effective strategy and relying on luck instead), but makes up for it in a number of clever ways: firstly, it has a large base hand size than Dominion (6 vs 5), increasing the odds you will draw what you need; secondly, it allows you to compensate for a lack of light with additional attack; and lastly and most distinctively, it allows you to choose between spending gold, and fighting monsters in a given turn. But enough about that.
Dominion actually adds a second resource in the Alchemy expansion, much to its detriment. I have not played it, but it is the least popular expansion. You need to buy Potions to build the more powerful cards, though getting a potion and enough gold in your hand when you need it requires a lot more luck than strategy.
The way that this is bad is that it limits the inherent number of strategies, which brings me to:
- There are not many viable strategies
I tried to come up with a list of viable strategies in Dominion. Here is what I came up with:
- Big Money - focus heavily on buying economy cards and try and make one impressive purchase per turn
- "Engine" Combos - use a clever combination of +action and +cards to run through large portions of your deck, ensuring you get the cards you need every turn
- Big Buys - the idea is to buy large numbers of cheap cards; usually to fuel an engine and to deplete piles faster and end the game quickly, before enemy plans reach fruition [Note that it is difficult to pull this off, and it usually transitions into an Engine deck midgame, or combines with Aggression]
- Aggression - you aim to end the game as quickly as possible, getting an early lead and ending it quickly. This is usually only possible to pull off in Intrigue with several Swindlers, who deplete piles at ridiculous rates, and replace enemy cards with ones of your choice, robbing them of their estates, and exchanging coppers for curses. It may also happen in games with larger numbers of players, who will each be buying from piles, emptying them more quickly.
That was basically all I could come up with, and the second two are not really that viable. I suppose I can't fault Dominion for this, as much of the excitement in this game comes from competing to make your decks more efficient rather than having diverging strategies compete. It offers a good variety of cards, ensuring interesting decisions from game to game as to how to optimize your deck.
- It is entirely deck driven
This is an interesting choice. I want to compare this with Tanto Cuore, which allows you to "chambermaid" some of its cards, letting you keep their Victory Points without clogging up your deck with VP cards. It also offers private maids, who never occupy your deck, and give passive benefits just for having them.
Dominion offers players the paradoxical choice between economy and victory points. Focussing on economy helps you in the long run, by allowing you to get better VP cards later, while getting VP right away actually weakens your deck by diluting your good cards with VP filler.
Tanto Cuore largely avoids this decision, by allowing you to get your Victory Points and then remove them from your deck, basically getting the best of both worlds. By allowing you to streamline your deck in this manner however, it makes it easier to have more consistently good hands; which they balance out by having the 2 Love and 3 Love cards cost more than their Silver and Gold Dominion counterparts.
Both options have their merits, and I appreciate the designer's integrity of Dominion to stick to this principle, rather than make a quick and easy expansion that adds private maid equivalents that give you passive bonuses.
Examining the merits of Dominion has prompted me to go back and experiment with it, and (as ever) try and design my own that builds on it.
But more on that later.
-Colin
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