I Was Wrong About Dominion, Twice, in Opposite Directions

I mentioned in the actual review that Dominion isn’t the game I reach for anymore, and I stand by that, but I want to be honest here about how bumpy the road to that opinion actually was, because it wasn’t a straight line from love to indifference the way the review might make it sound.

When a friend first taught me this on a rainy weekend, years back now, I loved it in the uncomplicated way you love the first thing in a genre before you know the genre has other options. I bought the base set within a week. I bought two expansions within the month. I was, briefly, the exact kind of insufferable evangelist that every hobby produces, cornering coworkers at lunch to explain deck thinning like it was a personal discovery instead of a mechanism that had existed for over a decade at that point.

Then, a couple years into owning entirely too much Dominion, I swung hard the other direction. I decided it was a solved game, that every kingdom collapsed into the same four strategies once you knew what to look for, and I said so, loudly, to anyone who’d listen, with the same overcorrected certainty I’d had loving it in the first place. I put it in the closet. I told people it wasn’t worth their money compared to what came after it.

Writing the actual review for this site is what forced me to sit with it honestly instead of running on either the old enthusiasm or the old backlash. Pulled it back out, played it fresh against my index card rule, three sessions minimum before I’d let myself write anything down. And the game that emerged from that honest look wasn’t either version I’d been carrying around. It’s genuinely well designed, teaches fast, plays fast, and yes, the kingdom setups do collapse into recognizable patterns once you’ve logged enough hours, but that’s true of most games eventually and I was holding Dominion to a standard I wasn’t applying anywhere else.

What I actually think now, three stars, respect for what it built, genuine fondness for where I started with it, honest acknowledgment that it’s not what gets pulled off the shelf on a random Friday anymore. That’s a less exciting take than either the evangelist or the backlash version. It’s also the only one of the three that’s actually true, and writing it down here feels like closing a loop I’d been carrying half-finished for years.