Dominion (Second Edition)

The game that invented the genre, with six of the dull cards taken out.

You are a monarch with a small and pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens, surrounded by unclaimed land and by rival monarchs who have had precisely the same idea. You hire minions, construct buildings, smarten up the castle and fill the treasury, racing to take as much of it as you can before they do. Donald X. Vaccarino's design for Rio Grande Games, and the place deck-building came from.

Everyone starts with an identical, very small deck. A selection of other cards sits in the middle of the table and you buy from it as you can afford to, building your deck on the fly and hunting the most efficient route to victory points. The box holds 500 cards and you use ten of the twenty-six Kingdom types in any given game, which is where the variety lives. This second edition swaps six Kingdom card types for six new ones and adds a seventh in place of the blanks; the rulebook has been rewritten, and Moneylender, Mine and Throne Room carry mild functional changes. Those new cards are also sold separately as the Dominion: Update Pack.

Perfect for: Anyone who wants to see where every other deck-builder on the shelf came from.

2–4 players | 30 minutes | Age 14+

—

📖 New to the genre? What Is a Deck-Building Game? — how it works and which games do it best.