 All right, so add packs the most recent facts Well, I think the story actually begins before that you want to begin at the very beginning Yes, so back when I was you know a kid I played magic gathering right in middle school mostly and I realized man This is stupid. It's all this collectible crap. I hate it You know and I sort of got over the collectible crap in college once and for all thanks to that McGorrier miniature crap Right, which is big mistake and I realized yeah collectible games are crap But the thing is magic the gathering if it money the wasting if it were not collectible Could be a pretty good game and but the thing is all the games like that Were collectible and I said man wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of customizable card game That was not collectible and I waited for this game to come along More recently someone said hey the game has come along It's called Dominion and I said oh wow it's come along and then I saw on board game geek This game Dominion just rose through the charts and I'm like oh look at that I'll have to get my hands on some of that. Yep, so we had the opportunity to you know We're at a con we're at anime Boston. Yeah, we grab in we're like let's learn how to play it so we went through the rules and we're looking at this deck and Scott you like he finished reading the rules. He's like this looks kind of shitty So I'm like alright, so I read it's like you know we were in anime Boston We didn't have a lot of time to really sit and be quiet and careful and really try it You know so I sort of read the rules and they were kind of bled And I was like I don't know if this is a good game I don't you know what is this one of those? It's you know mistakes like everyone loves raw, you know, but it's like way up on board game geek But we know it's just the Egyptian slot machine or twilight struggle, which is a pretty good game But it takes so much investment. It's almost not worth it and Battle or which is shit. I'm sorry that game is terrible Yeah, there's a lot of games that are way high and board game geek that are not good Just you know great the board game geek talk top ten is still mostly rock So I didn't pass final judgment on Dominion, but I wasn't gonna play it You know like rush out to play it. I was good. I sort of was like lukewarm on it I wasn't in a rush to check it out anymore because I read the rules Oh, wow someone calculated that with the curtain set of Dominion out there It is impossible for any human to ever play every possible combination sweet We'll explain that in a little bit. So yes, but you know, we basically going through this game We decided it just it looked like a crappy game and we just didn't even we're like alright forget this We just forgot about it. So packs West everyone's playing it. Everyone is playing Dominion even Gabe Mentioned Dominion the people you would walk around looking at board gaming and just Dominion was by far It was like Dominion and Agricola. I think we're the most played games Like walking out of the gaming area and then around and upstairs to the room to do our last panel I saw five separate games of this game going on at the same time Very popular game was that sushi game But I think there were only a couple sets of it, but I think they were in constant use Yeah, Jared was really like we were both looking at that and we didn't have time to play it But we're looking at it when we're getting geek after the show anyway So Dominion is being played like crazy and our friend awesome friend row Well, she got the Dominion set and they knew how to play. So that's perfect You know nothing better than being at a convention and someone else showing you how to play So you don't have to you know read the instructions and waste precious convention time So she showed us how to play and we were like oh We were wrong this game is the shit and you know what the game is the shit That's pretty much all there is to it end of the show It's basically it's cool because what it is is it's a drafting kind of game We're like you'll construct a deck and play with the deck But instead of making your deck ahead of time we're following something like rule for making your deck The main deck is made in the course of playing and you like you're making the deck every round with your actions Like you play your money and you get your stuff and you put them in your discard deck and you keep reshuffling So it's not just making the optimal deck It's making the optimal deck as you go because the final optimal deck You might not be able to make that deck because to get to that final optimal state along the way You'll have every suboptimal deck. Yeah, it's like in the beginning of the game You have about seven dollars and three points right points don't do anything But you want points in your deck because that's how you win That's the only thing that matters is getting point cards in your deck, but they don't do anything So if you just fill your deck with point cards, basically like let's say you do nothing but buy point cards, right? Okay, so you can't really afford very expensive ones because you only draw five cards at a time So you the best case scenario you draw five dollars you get a duchy, right? So now you've got four doll four points and seven dollars Then you got five points and seven dollars then sit right eventually You're gonna just be drawing a fist full of useless points Meanwhile someone else who didn't buy points right away is getting lots of money and other stuff and then later in the game When they have tons of money they buy even more points in fewer cards They buy like the six-point cards that is just one card worth six points You see how it's all about the proportions of things in your deck like when you make a magic the gathering deck It's like how many land do I put in and how many other cards do I put in right? What's the proportion that you got to have so that you won't you know draw no land right away And you'll draw enough land as you're going that you'll always have some You know it's that kind of thinking only throughout the course of a game early in the game You got to get more monies and then you got to build up a machine of cards that work together in a combo and You keep reshuffling your deck and drawing the same cards over and over again as the proportions change And you get you make your deck more efficient and more efficient and then you fill it up with point cards and then the game's over Well, let's go with all the novel mechanics. I mean one there's this whole you know You've victory points the only way to win is with them, but as you pull them into your deck You're like diluting your deck. Yep, so it's a it's a very subtle and nice catch-up mechanism But at the same time you have the almost the st. Petersburg situation where it's a game of whoever switches from money action to victory point First wins unless they switch too soon in which case they lose Yep, and you've got this mechanic where every round you draw five cards and you might draw more do all There's tough in the course of your turn But no matter what at the end of every turn you've discarded everything and you draw five new cards That is huge. I mean every card game like this from San Juan magic and everything You're always in the situation where you draw a card. You can't play right away. You want it So you hold onto it in your hand or you're in the situation where you have two cards in your hand You want to play one but you want to save one and yours in the situation Where like there are cool things you could do but you're held back and you never feel like you really bust out with your whole hand Yeah, this is like you don't it's not so much on your turn about like deciding what to do with your hand Right this very rarely is it actually a difficult decision of what to do with your hand You generally just lay out all your cards and you do the maximum you can do with those five cards and the real decision is what do you buy with the money that you have and If you somehow you know in the rare occasion where you can't play all your action cards Which ones do you play and then you throw everything out and draw five more cards? So, you know, there's a little bit less decision-making going on there But the decision of what to buy is ludicrously important as you will figure out if you play the game So the other thing about this game, right is that you buy this to the first of all I want to say Dominion won this field this yard, which is like guaranteed awesome game. Yep. So duh, just buy it Right so they're currently there are two sets dominion and dominion intrigue and they're both full sets Which means you don't need the other set to play, right? You can play just dominion intrigue or just dominion But you can also mix them together because it's the same game just different cards, right? It's whatever you can mix them up. They're coming out with dominion seaside I think they're calling it see port. I don't know I have this feeling They're going to be like tons and tons of expansions forever for this game. Yeah, that's fine But with the dominion seaside, you're gonna need to either have dominion or dominion intrigue to play with the seaside one But anyway, that's not out yet The way it works is there's there's some cards that you use in every game You always use the money in the victory cards and you always use the curses even though they might not come into play But the rest of the cards, right? You pick 10 and that's what you play with, right? There's a lot more than 10 types of cards in the dominion box So every time you play the game is different, you know You're picking 10 different cards to play with every time Imagine if like you decide to play match the gathering and you know, you pick 10 magic cards You know say I don't know 10 different creatures and that was all you played with that whole game And you know and that was it no other cards came into it That's what it's like and every time you play dominion to pick 10 different ones And if you mix together the intrigue and the dominion there are so many different possible 10 card Someone calculated on board game geek It is impossible for any human in their entire life to spend the entire life playing multiple simultaneous games of dominion To play every possible combination and they're coming out with more cards So that exponentially increases the possible combinations that you could play now the cool thing is the replay value is insane It's also since it's simple, you know these 10 cards you lay them out from the from the boxes if you find a really good set It's kind of like a free sell you can say like oh play with these 10 and get all your friends to play the same set in the instruction book It says you know if it's your first time playing play with these 10 cards, you know And it's actually a pretty good suggestion and they also have like themed sets a lot of people are naming their sets like the Demustulator or the demolisher or the destructor? Yeah, it's like play with these 10 like and the thing is depending on which 10 cards you get the game can be drastically different For example, we played a game at packs where there are all sorts of nasty curse cards like the witch Oh my god The witch basically proves to anyone in the world that everyone in the world is an asshole and given half a chance would destroy the World right so what happened in that game, right is everyone had really really low scores and tons of curses My final score was negative one and the game took forever and everyone rushed the witch of course Yeah, we ran out of curses like right away the game right but another game We played like we played a game with the beginner set and basically everyone got a ton of points and a ton of cards And the game was relatively quick and you know the game was completely different with 10 different cards We just played a game just now before the show, right where Basically, you know, it was there weren't any cards out that were worth $5 There were only cards that most of the cards are worth $4 and the only things that were worth $6 were the gold and the adventurer So it was like I kept getting $5 and then we bought all the duchies which are $5 And basically, you know, the game just dragged out and out and out and out and I wasn't able to keep up And I didn't get enough Victory point I've noticed the game is good. It's not great in that. It's no Puerto Rico No, it's not a Puerto Rico or me not all a lot of people on board game geek or geek are talking about all these really like intense Strategies and people like arguing about the different strategies for different loadouts. I've found that pretty much this There's only one real strategy and you only deviate from this if you very specifically must build a machine Probabilist probabilistically that will generate money eight dollars around to buy provinces buy provinces to run out The deck only deviate if someone else is going to buy more provinces than you. Yep That's the whole game. That's all strategy and it works perfectly And I've never found any evidence that anything else is a good idea. I think there might be a better idea If you know somehow there you find some way to generate like more points, you know It may be in a future set, right? There will be better cards than the province Well, no It depends more on what sets are out there like the real decisions you're making are when do you buy militia versus some other attack card You can bother with attack cards. Yep, like do you bother with militia in a many-player game when other people might be militiaing everyone? What do you care? Yep? No, it's it's that kind of thing. It's a good game. I mean, it's it's the decision The thing is don't think it's kind of like a Gricola the game of a Gricola is not Optimizing your farm. That's the obvious trivial problem anyone with half a brain Like if you're good at the game your farm is perfectly optimal a hundred percent You know exactly what to do in Dominion if you're even have half a brain and you're good at board games You'll know exactly what to do with every hand. You won't even think about it The whole game is figuring out what to do with all the ancillary actions on your way to the provinces to prevent other people From getting the provinces like in a Gricola all you're really trying to do is prevent other people from getting the resources They need to get more people in their family. Yep But yeah, the other what's really players won't see that so if you see that you'll beat them There's a lot of I could give a lot of dominion strategies Maybe we will but the thing that's really great about dominion is okay It's not as great as a T&E or a Puerto Rico, you know from a from a game perspective, you know, it's not some masterpiece It's just really great So why play it? Well, the reason is number one It's really fast you can just whip it out and play it and the setup is pretty easy And if you've set it up already you can play a whole bunch of games With you know very quickly, you know because you won't have to reset up a lot of the games You just pick ten new cards and you're good to go and it's just shuffle draw go It's so quick, you know other games like have a lot of setup lots of pieces lots right It's just cards. They're well organized in the box. You can just whip them out and play Actually, the cool thing about it is that especially if you're playing with you know a bunch of really skilled gamers Well, I'd recommend learning how to shuffle cards and you might laugh. It's not easy As many people who played with us like I didn't even think about it because I've been shuffling cards since I was young But there is like multiple people that we've played with you know because I know I know I don't want any of them to feel bad Because we've played with a lot of people. They just can't shuffle cards, which is understandable It's not an easy skill and you have to learn it is not intuitive I only know it because I've you know, it's like I sort of take it for granted But I only can do it really well because I've been doing it since I was three most people go to like, you know Card dealing school to become like casino dealers, you know to learn it later in life But they don't know it already. Yeah, but that aside like if you've got a bunch of people who are like Dexterous with their hands and with cards. They used to playing card games You like there's such a visceral and active feeling playing the game because you like you draw five cards You throw them all down you do all this stuff you grab them all you discard everything you throw it back I can literally take my turn in like two seconds if four Scott Rubens are playing dominion It'd be like turn turn turn turn turn turn turn turn turn turn turn, you know Like dude, dude, dude insane, but it makes this vibe where you're all like every round You're constantly picking up cards throwing cards down tossing cards around it. It's a really lively game But yet as a result, it's a very like social game much more so than many other games we play Yep, it's all I'm not socializing when we're playing teeny on my turn. I'm going It's also a game that works really well with two three four players and if you have two sets You know if you have dominion and dominion intrigue, I think you can play with five or six players I want to make the dominion tank police expansion. I know that's the joke that we always make. Let's play tank police. All right Please Now the one thing is the I think the cars that are in the regular dominion set are just a lot better than the ones in the intrigue set I agree the intrigue set is more sort of like these slightly weird cars. They're a lot more dickish You know, they do a lot more funky weird stuff and a lot less of the simple and straightforward stuff And you know that stuff can be cool, but it's like too much of it It's just sort of makes the game a little finicky and flaky, you know, but you know intrigue is still good It's good to have more dominion if you just had the only you know just the dominion set It eventually would get kind of the stale and you need the intrigue set to spice it up But I think that's why I'm gonna get the seaside set to spice it up even more Thing is if you haven't played it at all yet I would recommend just getting the plain old dominion and starting with that and don't get the intrigue set to Abort with the regular one, but just make you know actually learn the game Don't just read the rules and go actually, you know play it If possible get someone to teach you how to play it who knows how to play already. Yeah, that'll make it go so much faster Yeah, there are some minor gripes though one Copper silver and gold are all the same color. Yeah, that's annoying that bothers a lot of people I think that bothers me is to look at like a copper right and it says the number a copper is worth one dollar Right, but it costs zero dollars at the top It has two ones in the corners and a big one in the middle and a zero in the bottom left and it's sort of like You know, you could have made it look a little different. Maybe You know, so I don't I keep looking. I'm like, oh, this costs one other way. No, it doesn't it cause zero, you know Some of the other Problems I have is basically the seven dollar problem. It's pretty sure is intentional Basically, nothing is worth seven dollars in the game Well, the way to get around that is to get a buy action and then buy like a five into two That's true, but sometimes there is no way to get a buy I mean the game we just played there were no extra buys whatsoever Well, it depends on what kind of game you're playing I mean every combination is different and you have to Every different combination will have these ruts where like that amount of money is a suboptimal amount of money to have in your hand I know it's like, you know, if everything on the table is either four dollars six dollars or eight dollars and you draw five Dollars, it's like, ah, I wasted a whole dollar. You know, there's nothing I can do with it I drew seven dollars fuck if I only had one more he get the eight dollar card much better It's like eternally frustrating. You just keep drawing Seven dollars every turn and all you want is eight dollars. You can get the province One problem with the game is that having it in the boxes kind of sucks But there aren't really a lot of good ways to handle this game because you need to keep all the sets separate and easy to get to I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get, you know The long boxes that like baseball card guys put cards in the kind of have under my bed from when I was a kid And I'm just gonna put little pieces of paper between don't use paper pieces of paper Use actual like cardboard dividers with the tab at the top We can use whatever but you know, the point is just I'll just put them all in the box in one row So it takes up a lot less space than the gigantic dominion box But then I'll put little, you know dividers in of some kind What I really don't get though is a lot of people are buying sleeves for every one of these individual cards Because they're worried about the game like wearing out Seriously for the pain in the ass that is and the cost just buy the game again like five years from now Yeah, I know right the other thing is that you know, what does that really protect you from it protects you from Maybe a spill right if someone spills something Here's one worry that I think it is right no one spilled anything over any other board games Scott no the worry is that all right as more expansions come out the expansion cards will be obviously expansion cards They'll be less worn less tattered less frayed. They'll be newer looking in the deck That's possible. That's going to happen. But I don't feel like it's worth it I mean my magic cards you could tell my beta cards from my unlimited cards from my revised cards That's true. And we just dealt with it People didn't people didn't spend that much effort trying to figure out what was coming up in people's decks. I would But I don't think anyone else will know I mean seriously sleeves are a pain in the ass How are you gonna shuffle? Yeah shuffling is a huge pain in the ass when your cards are covered with like a piece of plastic It's also it's a lot harder to store the cards. You can't store them in the regular old dominion Oh, there's a whole thread on board game game or board game geek where they pointed out that if you sleeve them They will not fit back like in the box Right, so it's like you got to find a kind of box that can hold sleeved cards You know and the thing is sleeves were designed for games like magic the gathering And they cut remember like the penny arcade game came with those little plastic boxes That's the kind of little, you know, it's a box designed to hold like one deck of like 60 cards You know for game of magic. That's the kind of box you can get that will hold sleeved cards Good luck finding a box that'll hold sleep, you know a thousand sleeve dominion cards One thing I'm amazed about a lot of people are pointing out how they periodically replace The sleeves on their card games because they get so greasy and sticky What kind of gamers are they? Wash your hands Wash your hands. I mean Jesus Christ. There's no grease on our port Rico said Yeah, I know it's like do I put plastic sleeves over like any other board game? I mean, dude, Scott. We've got Gricola has a bunch of cards in it. Y'all see me sleeving those People are suggesting the same sleeves that they're all using for their Gricola sets Yeah, wow, you know, we need to take a picture. We got to put sleeves on all those little brown men in Puerto Rico I mean it's like I take a picture of that Yeah, it's like I put sleeves on my comic books, right? But that's not because you know, I'm like afraid of like anyone damaging them with a spill or something It's because have you seen a comic book, you know from like 30 years ago? It's like unreadable. It turns yellow and it turns into dust So and the thing is if I'm not going to read a comic book ever again, I just get rid of it And if I'm going to keep it, it's because I want to read it like for the rest of my life Maybe I don't really expect my dominion set to last the rest of my life. You know, it's not really necessary You know, it's like it'll still be playable. I mean my magic cards are already from middle school And they're still just fine. They're the same exact as they were and they're not in any sleeves Completely unnecessary. Well, no, my magic cards are all definitely worn out the ones that I used a lot and they obviously stand out as being worn out They're not greasy. They're slightly worn, but they're not no, they're worn enough to where it's obvious What's that they're from like it is kind of a problem. Yeah, I don't I don't notice that And in fact, I pay in a couple of tournaments I was I had to replace cards because they were worn enough to where the person I was playing against complained Uh-huh. And as a result, I had to remove those cards from my deck or use proxy cards. Ah BS. Yeah, anyway Of course, I also used to cheat Yeah, I would lick I I'd put them in sleeves But I'd lick the sleeves of cards the combo well together so they'd stick when I shuffle because you can't shuffle sleeves Yeah That's another thing is that I think it's sleeves actually Can enable some forms of cheating because you can like put things in the sleeves besides the cards You know and what like we're playing dominion. I'm like blackjack Yachty What am I gonna do you could put like a secret message and then you know pass it or something like that What's how's that gonna help me? It's not yuker. I didn't mean in dominion specifically. I meant in general What in magic? I tell my apartment. I'm going to beat you now Maybe in multi-player magic, but in multiplayer magic every the goals are obvious You just want to beat the two, you know, opposite colored people across from you The point is is that uh, I don't like sleeves. I don't like sleeves either But not for that reason that's it's an okay reason. There are better ways to cheat than secret messages Secret messages are the ultimate cheating method dominion's great. Seriously if you're a gamer at all And also if you're not it's also the new hotness get it while it's still hot and people are playing it If you're not super into board games I'd recommend dominion as not necessarily a starter game But a one of the early games you buy after you get into board yeah, it's definitely like You know it's like you get your settlers and your carcass own like dominion is next on the list after that It's also a great game if you're into games to get non-gamers in because you can teach them how to play pretty quickly And the game is so quick that you're not going to have people balking about sitting there for four hours It's also great You know if you've got like a match of the gathering car pokemon card game type of person And you want to bring them over to the german board games like this is the transfer game You know haven't played dominion than the settlers if they're that kind of person All right, I think that's I think that's about it. I want to go to bed. Yep. Let's go to bed This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music Be sure to visit our website at www.frontroadcrew.com Where you'll find show notes links our awesome forum a link to our frapper map and links to all the rss feeds We say feeds plural because geek nights airs four nights a week covering four different brands of geekery Mondays are science and technology Tuesdays. 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