The Dominion board game

Dominion is set in a distant land where you are a ruler interested in expanding his kingdom. The goal of the game is to buy victory cards; provinces, duchies and estates to expand your domination. They are costly though, so you must first buy more money and action cards to be able to afford them.

There is no board: each player has their own deck of cards which they reshuffle during the game. The cards you buy will come into your hand later on, when you draw your 5 cards for your turn.

Each turn consists of 2 phases: the action card phase and the buying phase. Action cards usually give you more actions or more money to use for buying cards, and can also mean an attack on the other players such as forcing them to lose some cards from their hand.

The one who manages to buy the most victory cards worth in points wins. The game ends when there are no more provinces left, or 3 of the other card piles have been used up.

While Dominion is easy to learn the fact that the arrangement of cards changes with each game adds variety. Many strategies can be effective and their effectiveness also depends on what kind of strategies your opponents choose, especially if there are attack cards in the game. Sometimes it is possible to chain cards (use more than one action per round, by using cards that give more actions along with others), sometimes not.

There are many interesting Dominion strategy sites and discussions in the internet, I link to those in the next module.

There is a German site called Brettspielwelt.de where you can play Dominion, as well as some other games, against others. Brettspielwelt is a friendly place, and people are willing to help you learn to play if you ask. However, it might be best to try the game in real life first since it is easiest to learn that way and the pace online can be too fast for beginners.

When you go to Brettspielwelt it's good to always ask permission to join a game.