Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: ackmondual on June 04, 2018, 12:13:55 am
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I covered some of how I'd categorized them here...
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1889010/dominion-empires-10th-expansion-has-less-cards-add
... feel free to use that as a reference, but I'll just keep things non-categorized for this thread.
======== LIKES ========
Palace - I like how buying Treasure can get you points, and these can provide tension of whetehr you'd rather get Platinum/alternative Treasure, or the standard Trifecta. Plus, it causes a 'hard decision' in games where you can still do a bit of Trashing (though not compared to completely stripping away all/most of your Coppers)
Fountain - Like another take on Gardens, and quite a lot of pts to boot!
Baths - when there is something to buy, it's nice to make a harder decision of whether or not you should. When there isn't anything meaningful to do, taking in the 2pts is nice!
Obelisk - Can make ordinary cards extraordinary. Also, they're functionally VP, but since most of these are NOT hybrid with Victory type/keyword, many of the restrictions that applied to gaining Victory cards aren't an issue here
Basilica - Sort of an homage to Guild's Overpay mechanic. Here, you either overpay by 2+, or not, but still gives you a reason to try to set up having more coins than not.
Tomb - always a fan of trashing 8)
Museum - I tend to like to get variety anyways
======== DISLIKES ========
Keep - creates tension in keeping track of Treasures, if you should hold on to some of them (esp. the alternative Treasures), and if you should go for tying to get pts, or going further to deny those 5pts. Ditto with just keeping track of other players' decks in general... I'm kinda lousy at being able to do that well. I can keep track of stuff in my own deck (barely), but other players'... esp. 4p games... tracking Provinces took some practice to get down, and even then, it's still not fully certain
Wolf Den - I'm pretty lousy at tracking this :(
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Favorite:
Mountain Pass. This is a nice way of adding a classic board game mechanic into the game. It changes the game just enough to be interesting without distorting it. Unlike, say...
Keep: Maybe I really hate area control games, but I certainly don't like it as a significant factor in Dominion. I think it distorts the game in an unpleasant way (for me).
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I like almost all of the Landmarks. They're a simple and elegant idea, and they change the way people play the game without messing with the mechanics almost at all. There are a few I don't like however:
Arena: almost never are you faced with an actually tough decision of whether to play an Action or discard it for 2 VP. Usually, one player will win the split 8-4 just because of luck.
Orchard/Museum/Keep: All neat ideas, but they take brainpower to remember how much of stuff you have, which is brainpower you aren't spending on analyzing the board. I guess it's good to keep track of what you have in any game, regardless of landmarks, but I'm just lazy.
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Arena: almost never are you faced with an actually tough decision of whether to play an Action or discard it for 2 VP. Usually, one player will win the split 8-4 just because of luck.
I think of it more as compensation for terminal collision. Winning the Arena split doesn't usually mean you've had better luck. It's true that it doesn't usually lead to interesting decisions, and has a good chance to cause annoying "gotcha" moments.
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Favorites:
Fountain - Often a bad option that gets ignored, but very satisfying when you can make it work.
Museum - Diversity yay!
Tomb - Trashing yay!
Wall - This is like Tomb in that it rewards you for something you want to do anyway (trashing) and it doesn't make much of a difference in the end if there's no trashing. But in games with trashing, it can present really interesting decisions.
Wolf Den - I can see why this could be annoying and horrible to track IRL, but online with scores shown eliminating all those singletons becomes a really satisfying sub-game.
Least favorites:
Battlefield - I dislike that this encourages early greening and rushes instead of building big engines that pay off at the very end.
Keep - Glad I'm not the only one who dislikes this. The point swing is ridiculous, it encourages boring money strategies, it's hard to track and the endless arms-race of buying the same cards over and over is seriously unfun.
Palace - This one just feels weird and arbitrarily convoluted. It also has a lot of the same problems as Keep: Boring money strategies, hard to track, endless arms-race of the same few cards.
Triumphal Arch - Ugh, most confusing Landmark ever. I often ignore it entirely because it's such a headache to track even with scores shown.
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There aren't any Landmarks that stand out to be as a favorite above the others, but I like a lot of them.
I like putting Obelisk on a weaker card in IRL games when you can choose.
I agree with what other people said about not liking Keep or Arena.
I don't mind harder-to-track ones like Triumphal Arch, Orchard, and Palace. My memory/tracking skill needs practice, and I think this is a fun way to practice it.
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I ruddy despise Keep
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Battlefield stands out for me as a least favorite, it's not even close. It is great at killing weaker engines.
Orchard is probably my favorite, since it is a lot of points you can get while still building, and it is not always automatic like some others.
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I like Keep...
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For me, Keep can be too successful at what it does, essentially prolonging games by adding turns of treasure buying that are not really moivng the game forward at all.
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I have a soft spot for Tomb.
Although superficially it is indeed rewarding you for something you want to do anyway, in a kingdom with strong trashing what it really rewards is accumulating junk to trash, and cycling things through trash for benefit as hard as possible, even when there's no actual benefit. That can lead to memorably silly and unusual games.
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I have a soft spot for Tomb.
Although superficially it is indeed rewarding you for something you want to do anyway, in a kingdom with strong trashing what it really rewards is accumulating junk to trash, and cycling things through trash for benefit as hard as possible, even when there's no actual benefit. That can lead to memorably silly and unusual games.
I remember a game with Upgrade and Tomb where you could Ugrade from Copper all the way through to Gold or even more. No +buy, so the best thing was to buy Copper each turn and upcycle it.
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I have a soft spot for Tomb.
Although superficially it is indeed rewarding you for something you want to do anyway, in a kingdom with strong trashing what it really rewards is accumulating junk to trash, and cycling things through trash for benefit as hard as possible, even when there's no actual benefit. That can lead to memorably silly and unusual games.
I remember a game with Upgrade and Tomb where you could Ugrade from Copper all the way through to Gold or even more. No +buy, so the best thing was to buy Copper each turn and upcycle it.
That's the same reason I love it. I've had at least one awesome Procession game with it.