What is it? More Dominion. Just, more Dominion
The deets: 2-4p, 30-45min
Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
Publisher: Rio Grande Games
You’d think we’d get tired of Dominion, right? This is the tenth expansion to the game (base game makes 11!), the second after Guilds which Donald promised was the last. Surely they’ve run out of ideas, right?
Well, Donald’s promise was based on the idea that he wouldn’t make a new expansion without new ideas, and he keeps delivering. The primary new element to this game is Debt, in which you can take cards without paying for them, but they come with debt tokens – and you have to pay those off before buying anything else. It also adds Landmarks which provide new ways to score points, piles with two different cards and you have to get through the first half to get to the more valuable second. There is tons of variety here, with new VP cards, new treasure cards, new dual-purpose cards, new cards that slowly gain point tokens until someone gets the whole pile… sheesh.
Yeah, I know, this game was released a few months ago, but any chance to talk about it is a chance I’m going to take. I had a chance to play a pretty intense game with Andrew and Nolan with a Landmark that required us to keep our decks small, so it was a race for victory tokens (of which there were a variety of ways to get). Speaking of races, Chariot Race made rather significant use of itself, especially in Andrew’s deck. Turn after turn he demanded race after race, which he’d set up his deck so he’d go through a bunch of race cards until he reached his Gold, which was the card that could beat me in the race. Meanwhile, my engineers made the best out of bumping my deck up with useful cards quickly, but alas it was not enough. I tried to use Groundskeepers to bad my VP account, but alas my engine for buying provinces got up to speed too late.
Still… what fun! Just please make Andrew stop challenging me to the chariot races.
