Boards & Brews at Home: Dominion

This is the first segment we are doing at home.  The idea behind doing this is that it's easier to play and review big box games from home.  Typically we play smaller games in public places for the convenience and security of limited components.  However, the segments at home will allow us to demonstrate our larger games for the blog.  For this first segment at home we're playing the deck-building game that started it all known as Dominion.  
This segment will primarily focus on the latest expansion, Dominion Adventures. We had this particular expansion on pre-order and just got it upon it's release a couple of weeks prior to this post.  As you can see, we really enjoy Dominion and have five different expansions of it.  To date, Dominion has a total of nine expansions and we are playing the latest and supposedly the final expansion known as Adventures.  It's one of the largest expansions released and it ranks near the same level as Prosperity and Seaside.

The production quality of the box, the cards and the tokens are definitely disappointing compared to the previous expansions which focused on much higher quality components.  As you can see from this picture to the left, the tokens in the Adventures expansion were a big let down compared to previous expansions that had engraved metal tokens.  All versions of Dominion have released under the same price in various game shops, and we would have definitely paid the extra money if they were willing to release higher quality components for the final expansion.

As far as the base game itself, the idea is to build up your own dominion of cards to eventually get the most victory points.  At this point, we've played the Adventures expansion several times, and it's quite good.  It's proven to be very versatile between nearly all other standalone/expansions of Dominion.  The Adventures expansion brings back the duration cards that you used during the gameplay in Seaside, and introduces reserve cards which are set aside and then played when the right moment comes along.  There are still other expansions such as Prosperity and Seaside that I would highly recommend purchasing before Adventures if you don't have them.  That isn't to say that Adventures isn't a good expansion, it just wasn't quite what we had hoped for after all of the research and waiting that we did.  Dominion deserves recognition for being the first deck-building game that started it all.  I don't believe for a moment that we would have the other deck-building games out there without the release of Dominion.  It's responsible for the whole deck-building genre and it paved the way for so many other great games so Claire and I have a lasting respect for this one!  Dominion as a whole is an excellent, essential addition to any gamers library and I absolutely recommend it for your collection.

Dominion  (Base Game & Adventures Expansion)
Overall Meeple Rating: 8/10


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