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[rrenaud]

I figure this is a lot better place to post this than BGG.  Presumably all the posters here love Dominion, and many have played thousands of games.

Are there any Dominion inspired games that are good enough to be worth playing 100 games?

I bought Thunderstone after reading some positive things on BGG, but that was a complete waste of time and money.

Puzzle strike seemed a bit better, but it just didn't really have the feel of "oh wow, my deck is coming together" compared to "this is completely random and now I lose."

[DG]

Ascension was ok. It seemed to deliver a fantasy deck building game with simple rules that you could play straight from opening the box. I'd worry about playing it 100 times though.

[Arya Stark]

ascension and thunderstone are a waste of money, I have darkfall too and thats suppose to be kinda like dominion and magic, its more like munchkins without the silly fun

[fp]

Probably not- and let me explain my reasoning why:

Dominion's focus is to build your deck. Almost every card in the game revolves around deck building in some way (it helps buy cards for your deck, it trashes cards from your deck, it adds/discards cards from the opponent's deck, and so on)- the only real exception are Victory cards- they do the opposite of deck building- they hurt your deck. But in any case, the victory condition is simple: you buy cards (just like any other card) that gives you points.

The issue with many of the forementioned Dominionesque games is that they attempt to combined the deck-building aspect of Dominion with something else. Hence, they lack focus. In Thunderstone, you buy cards one way, then have to totally change gears and earn points in a completely different way all the while worrying about "light" (and what have you). This lack of focus contributes to unnecessary complexity, a steeper learning curve, and no guarantee that a set-up is actually viable (e.g., play and feel like you are playing the game).
I actually, haven't played Puzzle Strike or Ascension, but I suspect the issues are similar.

It is blessing in disguise that Dominion came first. By being first, it could be simple while maintaining its elegance whereas subsequent games would have to add something else to the game in order to be viewed as elegant or worthwhile.

That being said, the next great deck-building game is not going to be great because it adds aspects that are lacking in Dominion. Rather, it will fundamentally change the underlying method by which decks are built.

[Auroch]

I've played about a dozen games of Ascension, all with people who had played Dominion extensively, and we all hated it. Talking to other people who enjoy the game, good strategy is apparently very different, and to a Dominion player counter-intuitive; it relies on staying far away from the equivalent of Big Money, buying the center-row cards you want that directly contribute to your strategy and a minimum of Mystics and Soldiers. I don't know whether this is accurate, as I haven't put their assertions to the test.

[lympi]

Has anyone here tried/seen Quarriors? It's the "dice-building" game.

I like dice, and I love Dominion, so I'm cautiously optimistic for this. From what I can glean from 'Geek, it seems more like "Ascension with dice" than "Dominion with dice" unfortunately… but maybe someone here can say otherwise?

[guided]

Has anyone played A Few Acres of Snow? http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/79828/a-few-acres-of-snow

I'm a big Martin Wallace fan and (obviously) a big Dominion fan, so I jumped at the chance to try a Wallace deck-building game inspired by Dominion. I ordered it recently, still waiting for it to arrive. I'm pretty excited.

[Captain_Frisk]

As someone who's played far too much Dominion and secretly craves some additional deck building variety. 

Ascension: There are some real problems here that you can find over @ BGG.  Basically, when you're adding cards to your deck, you're basically buying form a black market of size 6 - that only cycles when new cards are bought (with 1 of 2 different currencies).  If there's 1 trasher card, and you get it and the opponent doesn't... then the game is over.  Dominion is far better, but when someone comes over to play something physically with me, it hits the table more often than Dominion does because:
1 - setup is easier
2 - theory & rrenaud are the only person in real life that I know who it would be interesting to play dominion against.  If / when I see them, we don't play dominion because its so much better on isotropic.

Puzzle Strike:  This is the best game of the bunch.  It's clearly designed for serious gamers.  The problem I have with it is the way the game ends.  It ALWAYS ends with what feels like not good enough.  You start your turn over the threshold for elimination, and you have to see if you can crash enough gems at your opponent to get back under the limit.  There is at least "on the order of" as much skill as there is in Dominion (something that Ascension or Resident Evil can't claim), but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth at the end of each game.  Chips in a bag are fiddly.  Shuffling is indeed better, but drawing sucks.

Resident Evil: SUCKS HARD.  This is absolutely a cash in on the success of Dominion coupled with the large % of gamers who like Zombie stuff.  Don't believe anything positive that you read on the geek.... this game is trash.  It's just trash with a better theme than Dominion.

Thunderstone: I've heard mixed things of this.  I own it (due to a good deal from deniath) but have as of yet been unable to play.  The consensus seems to be: Not as good as Dominion, but more fun.  I'm told that the later expansions did alot of things right, and that the base game standalone should probably be skipped.

Nightfall: Haven't tried it yet, would like to. 

Quarriors: Die-ing (hahhahaha) to try this one.

What I'm also really interested in is the new Deck Building game from Martin Wallace.  I can't remember the name offhand (something like "through the snow and woods?").

Oh... and Blood Bowl Team Manager can't come out soon enough.  Will pre-order this without even reading reviews.

[MasterAir]

I quite enoy Nightfall. It has a good pacing and feels very tense throughout. Everyone builds a house of cards until one is overwhelmed and falls down.  I think that it suffers a little from kingmaking/get Fred he's winning. It isn't as pure as dominion, but is very good so long as you don't take it too seriously. The action chains are very satisfying. Also, it has Vulko, who is all kinds of awesome.

It won't likely generate this sort of online community, it is quite hard to play to win, but with the right group of mates it's really good fun.

Thunderstone is disappointing. I haven't played any others.

[Razzishi]

I played Ascension first, and thought it was pretty interesting if not a bit luck based.  I generally did pretty mediocre, and felt that the decisions that one made were completely irrelevant to how well you did as long as you didn't actively sabotage yourself.  Indeed there is very little reason to buy Mystics and Heavy Infantry if there are better cards available to buy, as quite a lot of them (with the expansion especially) are strictly better.  I've heard of variants that decrease on the luck factor and make planning much more important, but with official rules there's little seriousness possible.

I've played Resident Evil and thought it had potential, and while I wouldn't say it's complete trash it's rather lacking in components.  The basic concept is pretty decent, but the execution just seems absolutely terrible.  Adding another layer of victory conditions on to purely buying green cards could have made for an interesting game, but for story mode at least the outcome is pretty random.  The amount of each card you get is about half that of Dominion, making "Silver" and "Gold" quite likely to run out.  Popular actions you need to snatch up right away, especially in a 4 player game; there's not even enough for each player to get 2.  It seems to me like there's very little variety, although I don't know how it compares to Dominion with only the base set.

I'm not all that surprised that a completely new yet quite intuitive system of playing card games spawned imitators, and I'm not surprised that the inspired games are on the whole of poor quality, but I definitely was surprised just how much better the original was.  The quality of Dominion absolutely blew me away after having played those two games first; it really fits in a sweet spot where there's enough luck to "let" somewhat weaker players win occasionally but thoughtful play is still highly rewarded. 

[drg]

I wasn't a fan of puzzle strike, the bag instead of cards was awkward and silly.  Describing Ascension as always having a black market turn is a good analogy for it.  It can be fun, but it's very random. 

Nightfall gets too personal with 100% of the game being about targeted attacking, everyone can gang up on one person very easily or fail to attack one person just as easily.  There are certain groups it can work for, but many I would not recommend it with.  Targeted attacks were left out of dominion for a reason.  I've played with Vulko, what I see happen is everyone says 'He has Vulko! Everyone gang up on him for the whole game!'

Thunderstone I like except for the 'dungeon features' (traps/trophies) which are far too random, but it is a very heavy game.  You also need to be careful with the setup with the expansions, as the monsters can get incredibly powerful and the village can be such that it cannot deal with them.

[DG]

I had a play of the Martin Wallace game "A few acres of snow" tonight and that's a solid 2 player game portraying a colonial struggle between  Britain and France in north-east America. If that description hasn't put you off already, it is an economic wargame centred on a deck of locations and empire assets. You need to manage to this deck and your hand of cards to get effective trading, expansion, military, and so on. This isn't the game to take to your Dominion loving friend however as the next step up. This is for two players who like empire expansion games, or perhaps need a break from Twilight Struggle.

While I remember it, another Martin Wallace game that might be liked by Dominion fans is "London", which represents the rebuilding of London after the great fire. It hasn't any Dominion mechanics and may be overcomplicated for casual Dominion players, but it's still a decent 2-4 player game based on card drafting.

[rod-]

Puzzle strike has a lot of other issues, a a game, that are much more important than using a "bag of chips".  It seems to me that 80% of the "chips" in the game are almost unbuyable, and with only two (one curse-giving, one money-trashing) cards that give more than +1 action, and very few that draw more than 1-2 cards, there is no real action chaining.  Most of the games feel like a competition to see who can use their starting 3 actions most effectively and purchase some good purples to make sure they survive for more than 10 turns.

Personally, i love the bag and the chips, even though the felt covering of the bag gives me the creeps.  Shuffling dominion cards is my least favorite thing (part of why i love isotropic) but i have no problem giving a little shake to a bag before i pull out a random chip. I also really enjoy the flavor of the game and the way that it has very quick elimination.  Despite the fact that a player can be eliminated from the game entirely, it's usually only a matter of 3-5 minutes before the game ends due to spillover.

[guided]

I had a play of the Martin Wallace game "A few acres of snow" tonight and that's a solid 2 player game portraying a colonial struggle between  Britain and France in north-east America. If that description hasn't put you off already, it is an economic wargame centred on a deck of locations and empire assets. You need to manage to this deck and your hand of cards to get effective trading, expansion, military, and so on. This isn't the game to take to your Dominion loving friend however as the next step up. This is for two players who like empire expansion games, or perhaps need a break from Twilight Struggle.

While I remember it, another Martin Wallace game that might be liked by Dominion fans is "London", which represents the rebuilding of London after the great fire. It hasn't any Dominion mechanics and may be overcomplicated for casual Dominion players, but it's still a decent 2-4 player game based on card drafting.

Thanks. You're underscoring what I've heard about A Few Acres of Snow not really being all that similar to Dominion. I'm still really looking forward to it.

London has some similarities with Race for the Galaxy -- it's basically an iterated tableau-building game. I like it because it's just simple enough to teach to smart non-gamers, without being super light either.

[Auroch]

Has anyone here tried/seen Quarriors? It's the "dice-building" game.

I like dice, and I love Dominion, so I'm cautiously optimistic for this. From what I can glean from 'Geek, it seems more like "Ascension with dice" than "Dominion with dice" unfortunately… but maybe someone here can say otherwise?

From their preview video i saw a while back (can't find it now), it seemed much more like Dominion than Ascension. Given the comments I've seen here about Nightfall, it seemed most like that (you get points if your dudes survive a full turn, and other players' attacks are what causes your dudes not to survive, so there is probably a kingmaker/reverse kingmaker effect) but I haven't played either it or Nightfall.

I'm very much looking forward to it in any case; it seems somewhere between SmallWorld and Dominion, both of which are big favorites in my group.

[Agrisios]

Another boardgame with dominion mechanics is Friedemann Friese's "Furstenfeld". It has some negative reviews because many people take the beginner's scenario for the "base game" (and this one is quite luck dependend). The advanced version is the real game.
It has its flaws feels a bit solitairish - despite the (somewhat artificial) market and other mechanics.
I nevertheless like the game.

[Staples]

Although I have never played it, I recently stumbled upon Arctic Scavengers which looks kinda interesting and Dominionesque (cards, draw 5, deck building, etc.). It seems to force player interaction with little battles at the end of every round. Anyone else played this?

[play2draw]

A friend of mine just picked up Rune Age and we played it today... it's very different from Dominion,. The cards you select from to build your army (aside from a very small pool of cards) are based on which one of the four races you choose. The variety comes from four different scenarios you choose from, whereupon the goal changes (buying some really expensive thing or defeating a dragon), and there are event cards that affect each turn (usually bad things). The rules weren't very well-written, so going through the first game was a struggle; we all managed to lose because we beat each other up too much rather than going for the actual objective.

Ultimately I felt that there's potential in the game, but I think it's already in need of an expansion.

[guided]

Quarriors is a lot of fun, but it's a silly game where you buy some dice that look neat and hope for the best. If you like Dominion and a version of it with 10x more variance sounds like an interesting diversion to you, Quarriors is probably worth your time. I had enough fun playing 4 or 5 games of it this weekend that I'll probably buy it.

To expand a bit: The deck-building and "card-play" mechanic of Quarriors is almost identical to Dominion.

-You buy dice (cards) that go in your used pile (discard pile) until you need to draw a die from your bag (draw pile) but it's empty, and then you throw your used pile in the bag (shuffle your discard to form a new draw pile).
-Each turn, you draw a hand of 6 dice, then roll them. The face shown determines the play effect of the die. Then you play your dice.
-At the end of your turn (after you finish playing your dice) you can buy a new die with whatever money you have left over from dice rolls.
-You start the game with a really crappy set of dice that you'll want to start getting rid of if you can. In the meantime they can bootstrap up to buying the good dice.

The big gameplay difference is that you have "creatures" (faces that can show on many of the purchased dice) that you "summon" by paying out of your stock of rolled money in the middle of your turn. Then the summoned creatures try to kill other people's summoned creatures. The main way you score VPs is if you have surviving creatures left at the beginning of your turn (and then you discard them, score your points, and often get some additional benefit).

The major source of variance is that you need to actually roll the creatures on your creature dice. If you roll your creatures reliably you'll do well, and if you don't you won't. Basically, imagine if you were playing Dominion and trying to build a draw engine where your Villages and Smithies only worked half the time, and the other half of the time they randomly gave you $1 instead. The game is only a few shuffles long, too. In our 4p games we were shuffling maybe 5 times on average.

[Wingnut]

If you can handle a theme based around anime maids, Tanto Cuore is an interesting take on this genre.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65282/tanto-cuore

The game plays quite similarly to Dominion, but with the added mechanic of being able to put your Maids (also the victory points) in chambers to get them out of your deck. I haven't played the expansions, but my group tends to play a game or two of this when we want a change up from Dominion. The strategy is just different enough to be interesting and because the Maids are also the points it doesn't run into some of the other problems games like Thunderstone do.

[HLennartz]

If you can handle a theme based around anime maids, Tanto Cuore is an interesting take on this genre.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65282/tanto-cuore

The game plays quite similarly to Dominion, but with the added mechanic of being able to put your Maids (also the victory points) in chambers to get them out of your deck. I haven't played the expansions, but my group tends to play a game or two of this when we want a change up from Dominion. The strategy is just different enough to be interesting and because the Maids are also the points it doesn't run into some of the other problems games like Thunderstone do.

I tried playing some solo games with the 1st expansion, and the addition of Victory cards you can buy that aren't put into your deck (not clogging it up) gave the game a vastly different feel than Dominion. In the base game, the ability to simply buy Sickness (Curse, basically) cards and give them to your opponent seemed broken somehow.

The cards look like Dominion, but it the way it plays out feels very different. I think I'd have to play a lot more games against well-thinking players to really grasp how the game works, though.

Also, I absolutely love the theme. Barbarossa even more, though I haven't even read the rules for that one yet.

[guided]

Only one play so far, but I think A Few Acres of Snow has the potential to be phenomenal. It's actually more like Dominion than I expected, with the one huge difference being that you don't get to discard your hand at the end of each turn.

[Kuildeous]

Quarriors is a lot of fun, but it's a silly game where you buy some dice that look neat and hope for the best. If you like Dominion and a version of it with 10x more variance sounds like an interesting diversion to you, Quarriors is probably worth your time. I had enough fun playing 4 or 5 games of it this weekend that I'll probably buy it.

I think I can agree with this. I only played it once, so I was suffering from learning the rules. I had that initial look of WTF that I had when I learned Dominion. Fortunately, I recognize when I have that look, and I persevered.

It relies a lot more on luck. In some regards, that could be a positive, because I know some people who don't like playing certain games because they just aren't as good with the strategy as someone else. With this game, I bet that a person could win just by buying random dice. I'm also willing to bet that the biggest part of this game is to manage your resources so that you make your own luck, so that inexperienced player could win, but it wouldn't be that often.

I'm still looking into Quarriors, but I'll probably end up buying it.

[guided]

5 or 6 plays into A Few Acres of Snow, it's solidly my 2nd-favorite Wallace game now among the many I've played and loved (behind an overall top-3 game in Brass) and easily the next best deckbuilding game after Dominion. I would highly recommend it to lovers of Dominion, who will find a fair amount of their strategy savvy carries over, even if there are major un-Dominion-y elements going on too.

[Thisisnotasmile]

Somone at my local gaming club had brought in a copy of A Few Acres of Snow when I went on Saturday. I wanted to try it out but I was too busy at the time teaching people how to play my copy of Quarriors that I had taken in to show people. Hopefully some time in the not too distant future I'll be able to get a game of AFAoS in.