Monday, December 8, 2008

Game Night: 12/05/08; Dominion

Last Friday, our gaming group met as usual to play board games. As I have a friend in my other gaming group that posts the results of his sessions, I thought it might be a fun thing to do, just for kicks and some geek pride for the winners.

We had a short crowd Friday. Tim and Rob made it over, and the 11-year-old (David) sat in. Lee was flamencoing (or ball-rooming, or tangoing with his wife), Ben was Volitioning (he works a LOT of hours during crunch times at Volition, the local makers of several neat video games including Saint's Row and Red Faction II), and Dave was vomiting (his blog entry title for last Friday was: Number of Days Since I Last Threw Up:, and the one-word blog was: Zero).

I received my copies from ThoughtHammer of Pandemic (which has already sold out over there and is on Backorder), Power Grid: China/Korea maps, Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm, and Dominion, a game my friend Dave L. told me about.

So in sum, here is how the evening transpired:

Game 1: Dominion
Players: Brian, Tim, David, Rob
Winner: David
This was our first try at Dominion. The rules and game play are well done, so we jumped right in, using the suggestion for a first-game Kingdom Card array. David went the Topher route and started buying up a disproportionate number of Militias. This in and of itself did not win the game for him, as the rest of us started buying Moats to fend off the Militia attacks. David did, however, see the endgame coming quicker than we did. When he started buying Duchys and Provinces, we took notice, and saw 3 of the Supply stacks had grown short. By the time we realized that David was actually playing the game well, it was too late. So the 11-year-old soundly defeats the Institutional Research Analyst with the B.S., the WILL (local PBS affiliate that Barfing Dave also works at) IT guy with the Masters, and the Assisstant Head of the English Department at U of I with the Ph.D. Go David!

Game 2: Dominion
Players: Brian, Tim, David, Rob
Winner: Brian
After seeing the really neat play Dominion offers, we had to play again. This time we went with 10 random Kingdom cards. And we could tell, this was going to be harsh. There were no protective cards like the Moats, and there were 3 attack cards - The Witch, the Thief, and, I believe one other I cannot remember (edit: Tim reminded me we also had the Bureaucrat in play; can't remember if it's an Attack card proper or not, but he's right) . David started Tophering again and went for cornering the Witch market. We did have Cathedrals though, so I suppose there was a protective factor there. Rob bought a large chunk of these. David kept hitting us with the Witches, and at some point, Tim said what we all expect him to say about every game he plays: "I *hate* this game!" I saw the combo of Thief/Moneychanger/Cathedral to thin out the deck (even trashing some 1-point Victory cards), and saw the beauty of the Gardens, which led me to a victory.

At that point, it was a bit late to start a game of Pandemic, so we called it a bit early, but a fun evening. My friend Dave L. thought I would like this game, and he was wrong - I love it. After 2 plays, I see why people like this game so much: easy rules and simple gameplay execution, but the variety of combining the 25 Kingdom cards into a whole lot of variations leads to very high replayability. Trying to figure out what combos work well together for the 10 that get selected for a game is great, great fun to me. I want to play again.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Dominion is a great game, though the second game did leave me a tad frustrated with all the "f#4k your neighbor" cards, and a lack of combo plays.

CounterProductive said...

Methinks a House Rule might be in order. Something like, if there are 2+ Attack cards, remove a non-attack card and replace it with a Moat or Sanctuary, or something along those lines.

shaftiel said...

Sounds like a good time. Let me know if you ever need an alternate (or permanent) to stand in for missing folks.

Ever play Phase 10?

CounterProductive said...

Wyatt, feel free to invite yourself over any time. We do D&D occasionally, and have enough there, but board games could always use someone like yourself to make a fun evening.