I love deckbuilding games. Games like Clank, DC Comics Deckbuilding Game, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, and others have a semi-permanent place at my table. The game that popularised the genre though is the venerable Dominion, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino. This game is an absolute classic, and I particularly like the Dominion: Intrigue box.
Although Dominion gave rise to a lot of different (often more polished) deckbuilding games, there’s something that keeps me coming back to the thematically-dry Dominion. Simply put, it’s structure. I feel that most popular deckbuilding games don’t give the players many decisions to make about how they play their cards. In a video game version, you could just get by with the ‘play all’ button from turn to turn. Dominion limits your actions and purchases, forcing you to make decisions about what cards to use and which will ultimately be discarded. I like this. I like that there’s more going on.
To read my fuller thoughts on this topic from 2018, you can click below:
No Rerolls 
It’s been many years since I sold off my Dominion collection, as it had been many years before that since I had been able to play it. I still remember the first game I had, though, where there was a sense of, “is this it?” – followed by later games where the strategy that you mention in the original article comes to the fore. It’s great fun when you can spin 2-3 additional actions from your single action per turn, and I’m sure I remember my buddy Tony getting off a massive chain of actions that just seemed to keep coming once.
Hadn’t really thought about it until now, but other games do tend to fall into that, “well I’ll do 2 damage and then buy this for 3, your go” rote. Often, when playing the HP game, I’ll have later turns where I’m able to draw cards and so things can still “go off”, to a degree, but it isn’t quite the same.
Interesting post, thanks for sharing!!
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I think a big part of the “Oh, that’s it?” feeling comes from the really poor theming in Dominion. It’s so dry in that regard.
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I think you’re right. Doesn’t it have some vague idea about being barons fighting over land? Not the best, of course, but still enjoyable for the string of actions you can sometimes get!
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