Dominion

I own an old first-edition-adjacent printing of this that I picked up in a lot of games from somebody downsizing, cards a little yellowed at the edges, and I keep meaning to replace it with something newer and never quite do. Everyone starts with the same small deck, buys better cards from a shared market that’s different every game depending which kingdom cards you set out, and slowly turns a pile of coppers and estates into an actual engine.

The appeal is real and I understand why it spawned an entire genre. Every game plays differently depending which ten kingdom cards are on the table, and figuring out the strongest combination available that session is most of the fun. Where I’ve landed with more reservations than I expected is the interaction, or the near total lack of it. Somebody described it once as a game you could all play in separate rooms and just compare final scores at the end, and that’s stuck with me because it’s not wrong, most turns you’re not reacting to anyone else, you’re optimizing your own little machine in isolation.

And then there’s the shuffling. It never stops. You’re reshuffling your discard into your draw deck constantly, round after round, and it becomes the actual rhythm of the game whether you like it or not. I don’t mind the mechanical churn of it so much as I mind what it does to the cards themselves over years of ownership, and here’s my real gripe: the card size is genuinely awkward to sleeve, a slightly nonstandard dimension that means you can’t just grab whatever sleeves are already on your shelf, you need this game’s specific size or nothing. For a game whose whole identity is built on physically handling and reshuffling a deck hundreds of times a session, that feels like an oversight nobody ever fixed.

Still worth having around. Just budget for the right sleeves before the yellowing gets ahead of you the way mine did.