Dominion

I own this because you basically have to, if you’re going to review deck builders at all you need to have the one that started the genre on the shelf for reference, and I don’t regret owning it even though it isn’t the one I reach for on a given Friday anymore.

Setup is genuinely fast, deal ten kingdom card piles, add the basics, done in under five minutes, and that’s one of its real strengths against a lot of what came after it. It teaches quickly too, the core loop of buy cards, shuffle them back in, draw a fresh hand, is intuitive almost immediately even to someone who’s never deck built before.

Here’s the thing I’ve come around to though. The “millions of combinations” pitch on the box always struck me as a bit of a red herring once you’ve played enough. You start recognizing patterns fast, how many terminal action cards a kingdom has versus non-terminal, whether there’s an extra-buy engine available, whether the set rewards big money over engine building, and pretty soon each new random ten-card setup collapses down to one of maybe four familiar shapes rather than feeling genuinely novel. That’s not a knock on the design exactly, it’s just what happens once the training wheels come off, and I’ve felt the exact fatigue plenty of other longtime owners describe: loved it hard for the first couple years, play it a lot less now.

Two players is where it’s tightest and probably my preferred count, since the deck thinning race feels more personal head to head. At higher counts it stretches and the interaction gets diluted since you’re mostly just watching the market shrink. It’s a genuinely important game. I just don’t think it’s aged into my favorite anymore, and I suspect that’s true for a lot of people who bought it back when it was the only option in this space.