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Dominion clones

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trivialknot:
Have you played any deck builders besides Dominion?  Did you like them?  Why weren't they as good as Dominion?

I'll start.

Ascension and Star Realms are very similar deck builders, where instead of having supply piles, there's a tableau of randomized cards.  This leads to a much more tactical game than Dominion, which I think is less fun.  Between these two, Star Realms is much better, because it's faster and more balanced.  The card design in Ascension suggests that the creators didn't realize trashing was so powerful.

Puzzle Strike: Bag of Chips is so close to Dominion I would call it an outright ripoff.  Also I heard that the chips and chip artwork was shamelessly stolen from a Dominion fan.  That said, we had some fun with it, and the theme is neat (it's based on a fictional puzzle arcade game).  As for the balance, it kinda seems like the creator thinks the village idiot strategy is OP, so every kingdom is over-terminaled.

Rune Age is a game by Fantasy Flight, in the Rune Wars universe.  It's kinda like Dominion, except that each player chooses one of four factions, and has supply piles that are only available to them.  Also, there are three resource types--money, military, and influence.  And there are several different game modes, including one coop mode.  I liked it, although after playing it a while I started to think some factions were better than others.

Eminent Domain is easily my favorite non-Dominion deck builder, because it's so different.  A major part of the game is about laterally shifting your deck instead of building upwards.  There are five basic card types which comprise most of your deck, and throughout the game you want to shift the relative densities.  Also, there's unlimited saving cards between turns, which adds a whole level of strategic depth.  My one regret is that there's hardly any variable setup, so it tends to be similar from game to game.

Accatitippi:
A thread like this must definitely mention Japanese French maids.

I have played a number of deckbuilders, but the only ones I'd consider Dominion clones are ascension and star realms (I've never played tanto cuore).

It felt like both missed the point by a mile, but at least star realms was playable.

GendoIkari:
This is all deck-builders; several of them are probably not properly called Dominion clones.

I see Eminent Domain as being 80% Race for the Galaxy and only 20% Dominion. Yeah, it's fun but not one of my favorites.

Clank! (In Space) - Recently learned this. I had fun, but still; the lack of a defined order to your turn and way you use your resources felt really awkward. You play all your cards, generally at once, and then look at see how much of the different things you have. I guess the rules technically say you play them one at a time; but no one did that. Also, rotating supply means random luck who gets the good cards. But there are interesting decisions to make other than how to build your deck.

Ascension - Ugh. The ability to play any number of cards and buy and number of cards removes what's great about Dominion. The 2 separate resource types is ok. Actually Clank feels more like a clone of Ascension than of Dominion. But also, rotating supply. At least it has several cards with abilities that let you mess with the supply; to remove some luck.

Puzzle Strike! - Don't remember too much about this one, but the idea of a deck builder where your deck is a bag of chips is neat. Of course, the design is an actual direct rip-off of a fan-mane Dominion set. The multiple types of action points is good. Fun game; but terrible production with the way they kept coming out with new editions to rebalance things and make the old ones obsolete.

Trains - Tries to add some area control to Dominion. Fails, because whenever I play, I win by just playing Dominion and ignoring the board.

Legendary Encounters - I played the Aliens one. I like the idea of a co-op deck builder. But again the way your turn actually plays out is super fiddly. Play all your cards; then figure out which ones do which things; remembering which you've used or not. The faction icons just add to that mess. Dominion has neat combos like King's Court + Bridge or Tournament + Province without needing to have both cards say right on them "this card gets better if you manage to get this other cad in the same hand".

Quarriors - Again, having a bag of dice as your deck is cool. The supply is actually Dominion-like, which is good. But the main mechanics aren't great. Too much luck involved, and has a huge runaway leader problem.

Thunderstone - I liked this when I first played it, but never play it anymore. Probably the best of the clones. There's a version / variant with a rotating supply like Ascension, so that's bad. And it still has the "play your whole hand" issue.

Concordia - I liked this a lot, but I've only played it once. It feels like it actually is a different type of game completely; with deck building only being one mechanic used.

So anyway... with only a couple exceptions, there's 3 major problems I see with most non-Dominion deck-builders:

1) Rotating supply. One of the reasons Dominion is so good is because of the equal access... all players can choose to do the same strategies and such. Ascension, while not good, is the least bad version of this because some cards are built around this notion. Clank had almost no way to remove a card from the supply other than buying it, and when I finally saw an ability that would let you do this, it still didn't refill until the end of your turn, meaning that using it to get rid of a bad card only helps your opponents.

2) Playing your whole hand. The limited actions is such a brilliant part of Dominion. The decision to buy a terminal card is more interesting than simply "is it better than my starting junk".

3) Lack of a clearly defined turn order. Action then buy makes Dominion so easy to track things. In so many other games, you can play 3 cards, use the resources they gave to buy or kill something, then play another 2 cards and buy another thing. Or, more often, you just lay your whole hand down to start, then try to figure out how many resource you have to do what with. Dominion sort of has this same problem with the buy phase, when players can just play all their treasures. But the fact that those are only showing one type of resource (usually) eliminates most of those issues.

Holunder9:

--- Quote from: GendoIkari on February 07, 2018, 06:42:21 pm ---I see Eminent Domain as being 80% Race for the Galaxy and only 20% Dominion. Yeah, it's fun but not one of my favorites.

--- End quote ---
Yeah, it is tableau-building as well as deck-building. The idea sounded neat on paper but the actual game is not good.

Nightfall is a cool deckbuilder with direct battle, a neat chaining mechanism and a constant trade-off between offense and defense. It sometimes feels a bit random though and is sadly out of print.

werothegreat:

--- Quote from: GendoIkari on February 07, 2018, 06:42:21 pm ---Ugh. The ability to play any number of cards and buy and number of cards removes what's great about Dominion.

--- End quote ---

So I think this comes down to where you want your complexity, and it's an issue I ran into when I tried designing my own deckbuilder.  I think having restricted Actions works with Dominion, because it has a) 1 resource (most of the time) b) most of the time you're going to play with 10 different Actions c) many Actions have ways around the "1 Action per turn rule".

When you start adding more resources, or adding more types of cards (outside of a basic set in every game), these limitations just stop being feasible or fun.  Limiting yourself to one buy goes from being interesting tactically to frustrating when you have multiple resources to spend.  Limiting yourself to one action becomes silly when your card pool becomes more diverse.

For a while in my deckbuilder I added a "+2 Actions" card to the basic cards, just to guarantee you could play more than one card, since I had two distinct sets of "Action" cards, and removing the "1 Action per turn" rule (and thus the +2 Actions basic card) made things a lot simpler, and gave me a bit more creative freedom with making card effects.  Also card text ended up taking up less space when you don't have to write "+1 Action" on half the cards.

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