One of my favourite games. It is fairly quick to set up, not too long to play but always interesting.

There are about 8+ sets now. My recommendation would be to buy the first 2, the original and Intrigue.

Each set has all the base money & victory cards. One set is for 2 - 4 players but you can expand to 8 with both sets. In each set you get 25 different actions cards, so 2 sets gives you 50. In each game you use 10 sets of these cards along with money & victory cards which you can select or randomly deal. So each game is very varied with different tactics.

The idea is to build you deck from your starter deck. You start by dealing yourself a hand of 5 cards from your deck. You can take an action (assuming you have an action card) and you can make a buy with the money in your hand. This way you add more and more cards to your deck, providing expanding actions & purchasing power as the game progresses.

One word of warning - don't add victory cards to early in the game, they clog up your hand & make it increasingly difficult to get more!

Good game!

My brother has all the sets. It's my mother's favorite game so we played it a lot over Christmas. I enjoyed it quite a bit (but hate the Saboteur card!).

It practically requires a hand trolley just to carry your Dominion collection around, though.

I have it and seaside, traded away Intrigue. Never really got into it. I don't like picking out which cards to use (yes I know there is an app). Gameplay never got me. I much prefer Thunderstone with it's fantasy theme. Although I play that with that epic variety with everything shuffled in.

Or Marvel Legendary. Dominion is just too dry for me.

Dominion was created first in the genre, and suffers a bit that most of its design was done in one big project, then divided into expansions later. That is, most of the Dominion cards we've seen were designed before any other deckbuilders had been created *at all*. As such, almost any game since has Dominion to use as inspiration but Dominion is still mining its original idea, not building on others' work. (Technically not quite true now, as Dominion starts doing new expansions designed 100% post-release... but it is true for most any card anyone here has played with.)

Myself, I kind of like the "one deck" deckbuilders like Ascension and Star Realms and Machi Kuro (with the Harbor expansion, which adds this feature; without it, it's more Dominion-ish), where there is a limited market of cards available at any time, randomly repopulated as cards are bought, rather than a random market created at start of play ala Dominion. I just find better dynamics in that style.

I have a 30-gallon tote for that and Small World.

I have all but 1 set. We often play with new people and rarely use attack cards for that reason. At the end of the day you can select the cards that give you the sort of game you enjoy. I tend to pick a mix of 2 or 3 low value action cards,, 3 or 4 '4' value cards and then around 3 higher value cards, gives a good balance and variety.

Planning out a nice mix to create an interesting Dominion game is an art. There are some very nice sub-systems in some of the expansions (I like Alchemy, for example, but rarely use it), but you need more than one card from a sub-system or it just will overbalance in one direction or the other (too good or too useless).

Agreed