Dominion

Dominion is a card game that embraces the fact that it's a card game. It's not like Race for the Galaxy or even Battle Line, both of which are card games that try to emulate board games. Dominion is all about building your deck, then manupluating your deck to get the cards you need. If any of this sounds familiar, you're probably a former or current collectable card game player. Essentially, you have cards that are worth money, cards that do actions, and cards that are worth victory points. Each turn your allowed to play one action, buy one card, then discard and refill your hand. Some of the action cards allow you to do more actions, buy more cards, draw more cards, or just screw with your opponents.

The game is all about optimization. Victory points are in the form of cards that, aside from scoring at the end of the game, do absolutely nothing else. Point cards are necessary dead weight that you must balance with the more functional elements of your deck. I've seen players run a VERY lean deck that does nothing but buy high value VP cards every turn, and I've seen player run stacks of cards with a ton of extra actions every turn that eventually buy the same high value VP cards.

There are two things that I love about the game. The first is the before mentioned variation of strategy that's possible. There are about 25 different cards that are available to the players besides VPs and money, and only 10 of those are actually in the game. This means that every game has it's own challenges to overcome and combos to exploit. This leads me to my other point. The game is VERY expandable, with new cards able to be dropped into a game with great ease, making this one of the most replayable games I've seen in a while.

If Descent is D&D-lite, then Dominion is Magic: The Gathering lite. All of the fun, but boiled down to a easy to play concentrate. Don't let the CCG comparison worry or scare you off of this game. It's great fun, easy to learn, and fast becoming a must buy for board gamers. 9/10