Preface: if you haven't played Dominion yet, and (like me) you enjoy exploring a new game without reading discussion/strategies beforehand, you may want to skip this post until you play it (and I highly recommend you play it, it is a ton of fun).
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I learned Dominion at BGGcon -- I and my whole group love it. I'll skip the praise in this venue, though, to get to the core mechanic.
For those unfamiliar with it, let me summarize. Each player starts with an identical deck of 10 cards (money and VP). Each turn, a player may play 1 action card and then buy 1 new card, which is added to his discard pile, then he discards the remainder of his hand and redraws to 5 cards. Any time a player's deck is exhausted, he shuffles his discards to make a new draw pile.
Each card has a coin cost that is paid from a player's hand (the coins will then be recycled the next time his deck is shuffled, of course). A player starts with no action cards, but many of the purchasable cards are action cards. They do things like let you play more than 1 action that turn, buy more than 1 card that turn, draw additional cards (effectively increasing your hand size, and thus the amount of money you hold in hand), gain cards for your deck for free, attack other players (by forcing discards from hand or deck, for example), upgrade cards, etc. The other cards available are more money (and in higher denominations) and VP cards (also in three sizes/costs). The game ends when the 6VP pile is exhausted, or any 3 other piles.
Here's the kicker: VP cards do NOTHING during the game, but at the end of the game, the winner is the player with the most total VP in his deck.
For anyone who has played a CCG, the concept of deck efficiency and card density should be familiar. The more VP cards you buy, the more "watered down" your deck becomes with useless cards; yet, those are the only thing that matter when the game ends. Similar to the way a Puerto Rico player would build an income base first, and then start building a VP engine, a Dominion player will first build his deck's buying power by gaining more money cards (and higher value money cards), and adding actions that will support the faster and faster accumulation of cards, until he is ready to starting snatching up VP as fast as possible and then bringing the game to an end.
For an interesting discussion of some of these principles, I recommend this review on BGG: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/357857 .
Anyway, finally to the point of this post. As the reviewer above notes:
To be more explicit, in most setups the only real decision is made at the start of the game. You scan the initial setup, and based on that determine what's the best deck to build (there is usually only one), and spend the rest of the game on auto-pilot building that deck.
... and ...
It's not terribly deep or strategical, and interaction is limited. But it's still fun (and compulsively playable) because it's fun to, well, build your little deck and see it play out, in a feel-good kind of way.
Now if someone can use the Dominion concept, and make a game where not only the deck building part is challenging, but also the actual card playing, that may be a real winner for me.
I (and my family and play group) are still enjoying the hell out of Dominion, but you know, those gears are always turning. I was wondering if anyone else has started working on designs using the Dominion mechanic.
Sure, you should pay attention to what's going on, but the reviewer's examples and your example are both just about timing the end of the game. In general, if you look at your hand of five cards, you're not going to change how you play THOSE five cards based on what the person before you did or what you think the person after you will do; you're going to play those five cards in whatever way will best continue to execute your deck strategy.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- I'm still hooked on the game. I'm just wondering if it's possible to inject "meaningful" decisions into that "here are my 5 cards for the turn" part of the game, especially decisions that ARE influenced by what the other players just did or may be about to do (this turn - not just adapting to their general deck strategies), throughout the duration of the game.
Hm, put that way, am I saying Dominion is full of strategy but very limited tactics, largely confined to the endgame?