The Digital Tabletop

Published only two years ago, Dominion is a card game that already boasts three expansions (and another coming out this summer), a number of awards (including the distinction of BoardGameGeek’s game of the year in 2009), and a huge following. Though not a CCG, the style of play is similar in that it is essentially a deck-building game in which a deck is constructed on the fly. After a few solid sessions of gameplay with a range of expertise levels, we’ve been looking at some of the usual questions:

• What are the main game mechanics?
• What makes this game fun and interesting?
• How would this work as a computer game? (Also, how does it work as a computer game, since this is one of the game available a the online site BrettspielWelt)

Mechanics

Played with 2 – 4 players (we tried with 6, which became a bit cumbersome)

There are three types of cards:

• Victory – These are worth different point values, and whoever has the most victory points in their deck at the end wins
• Money – Copper, Silver, and Gold, worth different monetary values, which are used to purchase cards
• Kingdom - When played on a turn, these cards have a variety of different effects, from allowing you to play other cards to trashing cards from your hand to affecting the hands of other players

Before the game begins, 10 Kingdom cards are chosen – typically randomly. Depending on whether you are playing with expansions, the number of different combinations of cards you could encounter is pretty astronomical. This is what gives the game its massive replay value.

Every player begins with the exact same deck – 7 Copper cards (worth 1 money each) and 3 Estate cards (worth 1 victory point each) – and draws 5 cards into their hand. A player’s turn proceeds as follows, A, B, C:

• Action – Play any “action” card in hand (most Kingdom cards are “action” cards). You have one action per turn unless you play cards that give you additional actions.
• Buy - You can use any money currently in your hand (money cards, or Kingdom cards that give you + money for a single turn) to purchase cards to add to your deck. You can only buy one card per turn unless you’ve played a card that gives you additional buys.
• Cleanup – You discard any cards you’ve bought, any cards you’ve played, and any cards remaining in your hand. You choose five new cards for your hand from your deck. If at any time your deck is depleted, you shuffle your discard pile and it becomes your deck.

The game continues like this until certain stacks of cards are depleted, and then the game is over. There are a couple of interesting implications of the game mechanics:

• If you pay attention, you know exactly what is in the other players’ decks. This is not a game where it would be much of an advantage to peek at someone else’s cards.
• Your individual actions do not have a lot of impact on the other players directly (with some exceptions) – but the content of your deck might influence someone else’s strategy.
• The set of cards chosen for any given game can greatly impact strategy.

What Makes It Fun and Interesting?

Replay Value
The base set of Dominion contains 25 Kingdom cards, 10 of which are chosen for any given game. The number of permutations of possible sets is therefore 25 choose 10, or 3,268,760. Adding the cards from expansions (25 for Intrigue, 26 for Seaside, and 12 for Alchemy), we get 88 choose 10: 4,513,667,845,896. 4 trillion possible unique game setups? That means some pretty serious replay value. Obviously the changing of one card in any given set probably won’t have a huge difference, but there are definitely a few cards that very much change the strategy in the game. Even in the original set, just having a Chapel card (which lets you trash other cards from your hand) or a Witch (which lets you give curses of negative points value to other players) changes how you play the game.

When introducing several new players to the game, we first played with a recommended set from the game’s instructions as opposed to picking randomly. The set worked well for teaching, and everyone was a little surprised by how much the game changed when we chose different cards for the next round. Particularly if you’re playing with the same group of people on a regular basis, having something in the game itself (as opposed to just the actions of the players, or the cards they draw) that makes one round different over the next is a bonus.

Multiple Strategies
Though the cards themselves affect game strategy, it is also easy to try out different strategies as a player, particularly since games aren’t terribly long. For example, two simple but very different ways of playing are: (1) using “trashing” cards such as a Chapel to par down your deck as much as possible so that every time you draw a hand it has good cards; and (2) using cards that give you multiple actions and draws (such as Laboratory or Village) so that on a single turn you can simply get through most of your deck. There are also certain basic strategies that aren’t obvious to a novice (like trashing Estate cards, which are worth one victory point and tend to just clog up your deck).

Interestingly, first moves tend to have a pretty big impact on the whole game. For the first two turns, every player will either have a 2-5 or 5-2 opening (hands with 2 and 5 coins) or a 3-4 or 4-3 opening. The choice of what to buy with those first two turns can be significant – and it also occurred to us that for certain sets of cards (for example, with a powerful 2-cost card such as a Chapel), starting out with 2-5 or 5-2 can be a real advantage. In fact, it might be worth exploring a game mechanic where the first two hands are fixed rather than randomly shuffled.

Reactive Strategy
Something interesting to discuss after games were the strategies that different players used during a round – particularly since an important component of expert gameplay is to be able to identify the strategy of opponents and react accordingly. This can be tricky since strategy isn’t obvious from actions on an individual hand, but what the average hand in a player’s deck is. Not what they do, but what they have. And whereas there isn’t a lot that you can do to affect someone else directly, you can adjust your gameplay to develop an average hand that reacts to theirs. The game often becomes about an appropriate balance of weapons.

As noted above, there are some tried-and-true strategies, but it’s important to note that for most, there is always a counterexample. Most of the time, for example, curse cards are a bad thing – but if you’re trying to increase the size of your deck because of certain cards that makes that an advantage, then another player giving you curses is just helping out.

Fan Content
Again, it is the cards themselves that determine the specifics of any given game. Therefore, unlike most board or card games where the rules and setup are more fixed, it would actually be an easy task to add “unofficial” cards. On BoardGameGeeks there are actually some “fan expansions” listed with entire sets of fan-made cards that can be printed out and used on top of the base dominion set. Though the game creators don’t officially encourage this, they’ve come out and said that they don’t have any problem with the online publication of fan-made cards so long as they’re not sold.

We haven’t play-tested any of these cards, though it is interesting to think about the process of adding your own rules to a game. The discussions on BoardGameGeek’s forums about the cards tend to be pretty nuanced in terms of game mechanics, and how to balance cards correctly. Essentially, it turns players into game designers.

Mapping to Computer Games

BrettspielWelt
Dominion is already one of the games included on BrettspielWelt, a popular (free) German boardgame website. The mechanics are actually pretty good, though whereas it has the full base set of cards, there are only 5 cards from each expansion included. There are also some definite advantages to online play in terms of some things that make the tabletop version cumbersome:

• Automatic shuffling of cards. When you’re playing the tabletop version, this can get very time-consuming quickly, especially for those players whose strategy includes going through most of their deck every term.
• Keeping track of actions/buys. Keeping track in your head of the number of actions available on any given turn can get pretty difficult (since some cards have +1 action, some +2 actions, and some none at all). The computer version just won’t let you do anything beyond what you’re allowed.
• Counting decks. The online version includes a running count of how many cards are in both your and your opponent’s discard pile, deck, and hand. This is actually an advantage over the tabletop version, in that you wouldn’t reach over and pick up your opponent’s cards to count them (you could, in theory, keep track of how many cards they buy). Though again, your opponent’s actions don’t affect your gameplay overmuch – the only advantage this really gives is knowing the strength of cards that rely on the number of cards in a deck (such as Gardens or Philosopher’s Stone).

Overall, Dominion works great on a site like this – though we noted that it would also be possible to play over the Internet with physical cards. Because there are no community randomized cards, you don’t necessarily have to be drawing from the same stacks, so if you were willing to put in a little work you could play using a webcam.

Other Possibilities
Another possibility with respect to computational possibilities would be to build in affordances for player game designers. Much easier than designing, printing out, and adding cards to a deck would be inputting card values into a computational system, which would then allow for quick playtesting as well. Particularly in academic research, there are a lot of efforts toward getting people who are interested in games interested in game design as well by way of computer science – but this could be a simple way to encourage critical thought about game mechanics, rules, and balance as well.

Comparisons to Other Games
What we see in Dominion that we don’t see in a lot of other games, particularly digital games, is the high degree of contextualization. Though there are certainly a lot of games where strategy depends on the strategies of other players, or where your choices affect gameplay, the trade-offs tend to be the same (even if there is a huge number of possibilities). In Dominion, the actual utility of the cards changes depending on what cards are in other players’ hands. It isn’t just that a weapon in your arsenal is better or worse against someone who has a different weapon – but because they have that other weapon, yours serves an entirely different purpose. In a game that sometimes flies by in 15 or 20 minutes, there’s a lot to think about – and every time you play it, it’s a little different.