As Dominion continues its meteoric rise to the top of the BGG Rank List, I had been oblivious to this game until Rob introduced it to me. It was 9th on BGG at the time (just a few short days ago), and now it is 6th.

With way too many Magic and Race games under my belt, is this just another card game? Is this the end of all card games?

Part of its popular appeal is its simplicity - you always start with the same deck, and each turn you hope to improve your deck incrementally. A turn consists of two decision phases - an action phase and a buy phase. Between the beginning and the end are all the cards that break, extend and expand the rules - which you get to purchase during the buy phase.

The base set comes with 25 distinct action cards, of which 10 (perhaps random) are in every game - allowing for over 3 million distinct game set possibilities.

Jumping right into Larry's rant:

The game mechanics are interesting. A new hand every turn means you have to be efficient in using your treasure as well as optimizing future draws. The inherent rubber band nature of the points is not significant for me to complain about, as attacks are not targeted. The trade-off for this is limited interaction.

Luck plays a major component in this game, though the luck-skill gap is not significant.. yet. Perhaps I will hit that level, but not quite yet. With over a hundred plays on BSW, I have won a few games despite doing something completely stupid (due to misclicks or other GUI mishaps) and I have lost quite a few games which I felt I played close to optimal, but got outdrawn. In that respect, it's as frustrating as MTG, to completely beat down a deck, just to get top decked. It's going to happen with games of this nature, and with Dominion, perhaps a little bit more than you'll like - near the end of the game, it's a mad rush for points and it will fill your deck, making it slightly more difficult to obtain more points, which becomes some sort of a drawing race.

Dominion is basically a game of tempo, tempo, tempo. You want to run full steam from beginning to the end. Things that work in the beginning will need a little help in the end. The cards you buy in "cycles" will matter, but not necessarily the order within them. As nearly every card (other than victory points) speeds up the tempo, each buy phase feels like either you know for certain you know what you're buying (i.e., there is a dominating play), or it doesn't really matter what you're buying (e.g., market vs laboratory early game). Maybe it does, but it seems to be insignificant enough that you can usually get away with it.

Of course, this rule of thumb changes when there are gardens on the board - the only card that encourages collecting a huge deck. But the play for that is obvious - anything that gives "card advantage".

From a Type-I MTG background, the game is just fun with combos when the opportunity arise, drawing the entire deck at times. Usually it does not take much mental dexterity though, so it keeps the game moving. The decisions that you need to make can often be made during opponent's turn, allowing the game to be played very quickly and fluidly.

Card counting will probably become more prominent the higher the ladder you go, as the advantage of knowing what cards to combo will diminish. This will be near the end of the skill-luck gap.

The end condition is clear and there are no surprises when the end game is near, and when to shift into another gear. Usually the first shot is fired when someone pick up any victory points - and people will try hard to match and overtake. At this point, you are pretty much done with the deck, with minor tweaks here and there. There are still decisions to be made, and often the game is decided by those decisions.

The base set is simple, and while the quoted number of combinations before is not as variant as you might initially imagine - some combos obviously dominate and you'll notice them after a few plays, and there are only a few options, per game, at each cost level. However, it is almost infinitely expandable. Its parallel to MTG is not lost here - I would imagine anything you can do hand/library manipulation, so great creativity isn't even needed for the expansions!

Overall the game is enjoyable - not mentally straining, easy to explain as a gateway game, and pretty fun on top. Might not sound like much, but good enough to suck this guy into triple digit plays!