Dominion, developed by Rio Grande Games, is a strategic medieval-themed deck building game between 2-4 players. It was designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published in 2008. The framework of the story is that opposing monarchs are all desiring to conquer as much unclaimed land as possible whilst protecting their kingdom. Players act as the monarchs to construct their kingdoms through a variety of choices that will either influence their subsequent strategies or their competitors’ tactics. The physical components of the game is broken up into different classes of cards -- treasure cards (i.e. copper, silver, and gold), curse cards, kingdom cards, and victory cards (i.e provinces, duchies, and estates). The monarchs compete to build the most valuable kingdom and do so by earning the most victory points. Their assets are represented by their deck of cards. Each player starts the game with 10 cards in their deck and draws 5 cards to place in their hand. A selection of other cards are placed at the center of the table where players are able to purchase more cards as long as it’s within their spending limit. The purchasing options include buying victory points, better treasure, or special action cards. In each turn, players are limited to one action, employing action cards or buying cards, before discarding their hands and replenishing it from their draw pile. Propaganda Wars allows a similar ability to spend resources on multiple action cards but limits the acquisition of political influence cards to one per turn.
The dynamic of this symmetrical system establishes players with an identical setup and access to the same resources and information, providing to an equal opportunity for winning. The key to winning is highly based off of how skilled a player is at managing their resources. The only chance element within the gameplay materializes from the draw piles. The certainty of knowing what cards are going into your deck after purchasing them is balanced out by the uncertainty of not knowing what cards will be draw together within a hand. Players can choose any other player to sabotage with curse cards and that adds one more unpredictable factor into the gameplay. Another asymmetrical aspect is the question of who moves first. It is advantageous to go first, however, there are rules implemented in the end game to try relieving that leverage by allowing the player with the fewest turns to win in the case that the highest scores are tied. Stabilizing the ‘first player advantage’ is something that my group has struggled to secure while playtesting our game because it provided such a big advantage. We tested with different approaches and found that allowing the player who goes second to have an extra card does not disrupt the chances on winning dramatically and is the most fair. Our end game is determined by who can capture five citizens first. In contrast, the game time in Dominion is limited by the resources available. It ends in the circumstance their there are no province cards left or if three of the purchasable decks are diminished. Both games are similar during the end game because the winner is contingent on whoever has the majority of one resource. Players continually adapt their strategy to comply with the cards they are provided in a turn. Each turn begins with a new hand and any cards that were previously bought are recycled into their deck. All resources are manipulated by the players themselves whether they are acquiring cards or sabotaging other players’ hands. Players are limited to the cards available for purchase, forcing players to fight over the same goods. Every action shrinks the pool of resources and actions that can be bought. Because the cards in the center are faced up, players know what type of cards are being bought and can see throughout the entire game who may be winning and plan for a curse to be placed on them. Usually a good strategy would be finding cards that allow a player to use more than one action per turn or cards that double their money so they can buy more resources. There are cards that counteract the effect of curse cards. This mechanic can be found in our game, Propaganda Wars, in which there are political influence cards that nullify the outcome of another P.I. effect (e.g. the political assassination card). Dominion relies exclusively on cards for gameplay while Propaganda Wars relies heavily on cards for the means of movement and gameplay variation. Propaganda Wars uses a board and pawns simply as a way of recording progress. My group can use more games that concentrate on decks for operating their game systems to further improve our game. We could improve the probability of the types of moves that could be played, the placement of political cards within each level, and probably the artwork on the cards.
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December 2017
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