I couldn’t run a series of features about old games and not talk about Dominion. When I drew up a shortlist of games I wanted to talk about, at first I automatically excluded Dominion, because it doesn’t feel like an old game to me. But using my own reasoning, it is an old game now. Dominion was first released in 2008, which means my own copy is now old enough to legally have a beer at the pub. Donald X Vaccarino’s masterwork is eighteen years old, and I still play it regularly.

Maybe you should, too.

What do you do in Dominion?

While there’s plenty of chatter about what the first deck-building game is. For me, Dominion is the one that counts. It’s the grand daddy of deck-building games, and it’s still one of the best.

If you’ve made it this far and still have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention deck-building, let me explain. You start the game with a shuffled deck of cards. On your turn, you play cards from your hand to perform actions and to buy new cards from some kind of market. The cards you play, buy and discard all go into your discard pile. When your draw pile runs out, you shuffle the discard pile, and it becomes your draw pile. So you try to buy cards that, once they end up in your hand, all work together and help you win the game.

That’s the short version, and it’s far from prescriptive. Some games don’t have you shuffle your discard pile, some let you take the bought cards straight into your hand. Some use the cards to move pieces around a board. They’re all variations on a theme.

Dominion strips the idea back to its core. Your cards are either VP cards (you need them in your deck to win, but can’t use them to do anything with when you draw them), money cards (use them to buy more cards from the market), or action cards. Actions might let you draw more cards into your hand, give you more money to spend, or even attack your opponents by making them take negative VP cards, or have a smaller number of cards in-hand.

When the Province deck (provinces are the VP cards worth the most points) is exhausted, or any two of the other market decks are all gone, the game ends. You total up all of the VP cards in your deck, and the player with the most wins.

Why should you play Dominion in 202x?

Dominion is a game which I can honestly say I still play today. I think it’s probably my most-played game ever. I’ve had a physical copy since 2009, which I played as recently as last month at a local games club. I played multiple games per night, every Saturday night over lockdown in 2020 on the official website. I still love it, and I still play almost exclusively with just the base game.

In each game, you use a selection of 10 of the included 25 different kingdom decks, so there’s a huge amount of variety right there. If you want something more, though, there are an absolute ton of expansions available which all kinds of nonsense to Dominion.

The main reason to still play Dominion today, though, is simple. It’s fun. It’s really, really good fun. New players will pick up the mechanisms really quickly, and after that, the game flows about as smoothly as any game you’ll play. The mini dopamine hits of saying things like “Village, Market, Village, Village, Smithy, and I now have 10 to spend” never gets old.

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Dominion is a clean, simple, addictive deck-builder that, in my opinion, hasn’t been bettered. It all just works. It’s utterly superb. If you’re reading this, having spent any length of time playing Dominion over the years, I hope you’re nodding your head at this point. If you’re looking for something a bit different from its faux medieval/fantasy setting, there are lots of other options. Core Worlds and Star Realms take it to space. Aeon’s End lets you use spells and weapons to battle monsters.

I like Dominion so much that my business cards are even based on it!

Over to you

❓ Have you played Dominion?

❓ What’s your favourite Dominion expansion?

❓ Is there a better deck-builder? What is it?

⬇️ Let me know in the comments below ⬇️