Dominion With Hilary

In the last year, Dominion has taken the board gaming world by storm. Its innovative blend of collectible-card-game-style deck building and simple game play has made it a hit among gamers and non-gamers alike. Each player starts with a small deck of 10 cards and adds cards to their deck as the game progresses. Each game, there is a different set of 10 cards available for players to add to their decks (out of a total of 25 different cards in the base set).

I recently picked up Dominion: Intrigue, which is the first expansion for Dominion, but can also be played on its own. The cards in Intrigue are a bit more involved, and after one game with only the intrigue cards, it became clear that we were going to need to get the base game as well. A couple days later, Hilary picked it up at Gamescape, and we wasted little time in getting it to the table.

On this evening, we played twice to refamiliarize ourselves with the game before mixing in the expansion. The first game featured the chapel, a card that allows you to remove cards from your deck, and as any seasoned Magic: The Gathering player will tell you, one of the most powerful things you can do to make a deck better is remove the cards which are merely "OK" to allow yourself to get to the really good cards more often. In this particular game I may have overdone that a bit as I stripped my deck down to almost nothing immediately. Once I got some silver and gold added, it started to turn over pretty well, but Hilary had managed to split the 6-point victory cards with me 4-4, meaning that her 3 1-point cards (which I had cleverly removed from my deck) were her margin of victory.

Scores:
Hilary 27
Chris 24

Game Time: 35 minutes