Dominion (card game)

Dominion is a card game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Originally published in 2008, it was the first deck-building game, and inspired a genre of games building on its central mechanic.
In Dominion, each player takes turns repeatedly drawing through their own personal deck of cards. Each player's deck starts small, but players can purchase new cards from a common supply to upgrade their deck; these new cards can then be drawn and used on future turns. Players ultimately seek to build the strongest deck with the most victory points needed to win the game.
The game has a medieval theme with card names referencing pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures. Comparisons about the game's feel are often drawn with collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering. As of September 2024, sixteen expansions to the original Dominion have been released.
When Dominion was released at the Spiel game fair in 2008, it was voted "best game of the fair" by the Fairplay polls. The next year it won the Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher Spiele Preis awards. It was one of five winning games in American Mensa's 2009 MindGame competition. By 2017, more than 2.5 million copies of Dominion and its expansions had been sold worldwide.
In a game of Dominion, two to four players compete to gather the most victory points by strategically building a deck of cards. Each player starts with a small deck containing a few weak cards, with which they acquire more cards with different and more powerful abilities. Some provide more of the in-game currency, "coins"; others let the player perform more actions or buy more cards per turn; others let them draw more cards, harm the other players, remove unwanted cards from their decks, or do other things. As players improve their decks, they also think about how to improve their scores; a powerful deck may be worth no victory points. The game has been compared to the "draft" gameplay style of collectible card games where players vie for the best deck from a common pool of cards.
Cards are classified into types, which are listed at the bottom of each card. The six types in the base set are:
Cards may have more than one type; for instance, an Action might also be an Attack. Certain cards are affected by other cards' types; for instance, some Reactions are triggered when another player uses an Attack card.
In addition, cards are divided into two groups: base cards, which are present in every game, and kingdom cards, of which each game has a different assortment. The base cards consist of Curse cards, three kinds of Treasure, and three kinds of Victory cards. Kingdom cards are mostly actions, but some have other types, including Treasure and Victory. There is one pile of each card in the game; once the pile is empty, players can no longer buy that card. Together, these cards form the supply. Note that a few cards from expansions change these rules.
To begin a game, players decide on the kingdom cards they are going to use, either selecting them or choosing randomly, and setting out the supply. Cards from any sets of Dominion can be mixed freely, creating a large number of possible setups. Then, each player gets the same starting deck of ten cards, consisting of seven Copper cards (low-value treasure) and three Estate cards (low-value victory). Each player shuffles their deck and draws the top five cards to form their hand.
Each turn, the player gains one action and one buy and performs the following phases in order (abbreviated as "ABC" as a mnemonic for newer players):
If the player must draw a card from their deck, but their deck is empty, they shuffle their discard pile to create a new deck. Some Action cards can trash cards, removing them from players' decks and into the Trash pile, where they are out of the game (though a few actions from expansions can recover them).
The game usually ends under one of two conditions: when the stack of Province cards (the highest-value Victory card in the base game) has been exhausted, or when any three stacks in the supply have been exhausted. Players then count the number of victory points in their decks, and the player with the highest score wins. Other end-game conditions have been introduced in the game's expansions.
Since possessing Victory cards is often necessary to win the game, but they usually have no value during gameplay, players must balance the acquisition of Victory cards with Action and Treasure cards that maintain the player's ability to play effective turns. Usually, the game's main strategy is to build a deck that maximizes the player's ability to draw hands that can buy Provinces.
Due to the game’s commercial success, several expansions have been released. The basic set is simple, but each expansion adds more complexity, typically through the addition of new kingdom cards but also through additional rules, such as adding new card types or changing the composition of each players' starting deck when using that expansion.
Some expansions have added "landscapes" to the game setup. These are distinguished from cards by having landscape orientation rather than portrait, and do not enter the players' hand or deck, but are either resolved immediately or placed in the players' play area for later use. These have different effects on the game; for example, the Adventures expansion introduced the ability to buy Events, which provide immediate bonuses. Other expansions have introduced tokens for tracking game progression. The Prosperity expansion introduced victory point tokens, which can be earned by playing certain kingdom cards; these increase players' scores but do not dilute their decks with victory cards. If players use kingdom cards that require these non-supply card stacks or tokens, these are set up alongside the supply prior to play.
Many reviews recommend buying expansions to increase the variety of the game, as cards from different sets may be freely mixed with each other.
Vaccarino was a software developer in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, he created supplements for Dungeons & Dragons and created games based on existing board games. After the release of Magic: The Gathering in 1993, he began designing more seriously and created a 90-card fan expansion, Edge of the World, and became an informal contributor towards additional Magic works; he is credited in the official rulebook. Vaccarino has said that Magic inspired him to design games, and introduced him both to games with drafting and to cards with interacting rules. Later, he developed several game ideas and discussed them with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic.
In 2006, Vaccarino invented the deck-building mechanic while working on a fantasy adventure card game called "Spirit Warriors II". He struggled with the mechanics before a deadline of showing the game to his gaming group, and spent a weekend stripping it down to its core elements; specifically, having problems with introducing new cards over the course of the game, Vaccarino opted to simply have all cards available at the start. The game immediately became popular with his gaming group, overshadowing the usual staples, including Magic, for the next two years.
With this success, Vaccarino began looking to refine and publish the game. During the 2007 Origins Game Fair, Vaccarino demonstrated the game and gained the interest of Rio Grande Games. Shortly after he signed with Rio Grande, BoardGameGeek's columnists Valerie Putman and Dale Yu requested permission from Rio Grande to develop the game. During development, Dominion was called "Castle Builder", owing to its theme of building rooms in a castle, and then, later, "Game X". Yu came up with the final name of Dominion. Vaccarino had, early on, planned for the game to grow through expansions, though focused these on maintaining the core functionality of the game instead of immediately adding "exotic things"; this was to ensure that, if the game did take off, early expansions would not create incompatible sets of cards: one focused on the normal Dominion play, and others with a strange new mechanic. In a post to BoardGameGeek, Vaccarino suggested that he had originally planned seven different expansions, and, tuning the core game for release, brought cards into the base game that were originally planned for later expansions.
As more expansions were released, Vaccarino added new rules to prevent undesirable game situations and permit new mechanics. In 2016, Rio Grande Games began releasing a second edition of the game, which improved layout and adjusted some card effects. The base game and Intrigue were most affected, as some cards were removed, more powerful ones were added, and the base cards were removed from Intrigue. Upgrade packs for players who already owned the first editions of these sets were also sold. Second-edition versions of the Seaside, Prosperity, Hinterlands, Cornucopia, and Guilds expansions, similarly phasing out some old cards and introducing new ones, were released in 2022 and 2024.
Numerous expansions have been released for Dominion, and mini-expansions, most consisting of a set of a single kind of kingdom card, have been released as promotional items. Intrigue has been recommended as the first expansion to purchase after the base set for play. Vaccarino originally planned to stop expanding the game after Guilds, though he conceded:
Two "Big Box" sets have been released. The first contained Dominion First Edition, Alchemy, Prosperity, and the promotional cards Envoy and Black Market. Later editions included alternate promotional cards: Walled Village and Governor. This was released in 2010 and is no longer available. Big Box II was released in 2016, and contains Dominion Second Edition, Intrigue Second Edition, and additional base cards for 5 and 6 player games.
After the release of Menagerie in 2020, Dominion included 585 differently named cards and landscapes (such as events), and there were 366 kingdom card piles, including the 6 each in the 1st Edition Base and Intrigue releases that were later replaced. In 2021, researchers calculated that there were over 66 sextillion possible unique game combinations.
Since the game and its expansions feature over 4,000 individual cards, Rio Grande Games has licensed manufacturers' creation of containers to store all the cards into one or two boxes.
Several unofficial online implementations of Dominion existed before there was a licensed online version; Rio Grande Games requested that these be discontinued once the official online implementation was released. One of these unofficial implementations, however, located at dominion.isotropic.org, was used by Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino and his playtesters during the development of new cards, even long after the site was closed to the public.
A licensed browser-based online implementation of Dominion, hosted by Goko, went live in early March 2013. It was originally intended to be released to the public on August 16, 2012, but because of bugs and server overload, it was withdrawn from public release and returned to beta testing. The official app provided the base Dominion game free to play, and cards from the expansions available for a fee. In October 2015, the official Goko online implementation of Dominion transitioned to a new official 2.0 online implementation developed by Making Fun. Making Fun honored all purchases made by customers from the original Goko implementation, but in February 2016, John Welch, CEO of Making Fun announced that the license granted to Making Fun by Rio Grande Games to develop the official online Dominion game would expire at the end of 2016, and would not be renewed with Making Fun. From January 1, 2017, development of the official online Dominion game is licensed to Shuffle iT, a company formed by two high-ranked Dominion players. They were dissatisfied with all prior online implementations of Dominion and proposed their new approach to Vaccarino, who was impressed with what the two developers were able to do and gave them the license.
Temple Gates Games released a licensed version of Dominion for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android devices in early access in October 2021. This game was developed using artificial intelligence and neural networks to provide viable computer opponents, which the developers claim was advanced enough to be able to learn new cards that were not used in training. The game is offered as a free-to-play game that includes the original base Dominion game, with paid downloadable content for each of the card game's expansions.
The original Dominion set won several awards, including the Spiel des Jahres, the Deutscher Spiele Preis, an Origins award and a Diana Jones Award. In addition, it and the expansions have sold more than 2.5 million copies and been translated into 18 languages: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, bokmål Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
Dominion is one of the first board games that included a deckbuilding mechanic. Many board games, such as Mage Knight Board Game and many video games, such as Slay the Spire., use deckbuilding as a core game mechanic, the origins of which can be attributed to Dominion.
Dominion has been praised for its speed and simplicity, as well as its strategic depth; there are many ways to win. Other reviewers have noted the game’s replayability. However, it has been criticised as "almost abstract" for its weak theme, described as "multiplayer solitaire", and the theme has been criticised as generic, though a minor issue in the playability.
The Spiel des Jahres, a highly prestigious prize, is primarily intended for family games, and the winner is generally purchased in large volume within Germany for that purpose. Dominion received this prize in 2009, and two years later, a second prize, Kennerspiel des Jahres, was created, intended for more complex games aimed at audiences of adults; the name literally means "Expert-game of the year". Dominion's prize had received backlash, as many families considered it too complex for a family game. This is widely credited as an influential event in the establishment of the Kennerspiel prize. In both the year prior to Dominion's award, and the year following, complex games received ad-hoc special prizes, which had been awarded intermittently in earlier years as well, and 2009 was notable in that a complex game received an award, but crowded out the 'main' family-game award. Further controversies of this kind have not occurred since the first Kennerspiel prize in 2011, suggesting that, if this was the goal, it has been successful.