Dominion is a shining example of element design

written 2024-09-26

Dominion is a card game that I've always liked more than other card games because of the lesser amount of randomness. It's still a turn-based game with randomness, so it's not one of my favorite games, but it is a shining example of good card design, and I think anyone wanting to design a game that has cards or any similar kind of element can learn from Dominion.

The first notable thing about Dominion is that it's a free-for-all game where players can interact with and attack each other, yet it doesn't have gang-up dynamics like most other free-for-all games (where players can gang up on whoever's in the lead or who they don't like and destroy that person, and this effect is so powerful as to make strategy irrelevant compared to social manipulation). How does it achieve this?

Every attack card in Dominion affects all other players. For example, Militia's effect is "each other player discards down to 3 cards", so people can't gang up on you.

Militia

Militia also shows an example of another piece of deisgn wisdom. At first glance, the card seems equivalent to "each other player discards 2 cards", since each player normally starts each turn with a 5-card hand. So why doesn't it just say discard 2? Because then, if multiple people played Militia in one round (or one person played it multiple times), they could completely empty your hand and leave you with no options. And people *would* play it multiple times, because discard gets stronger the more you stack. If you have to discard 2 of your 5 cards, it'll be the worst 2, but if you have to discard 2 more, it'll be your 3rd and 2nd best cards. Militia is designed to avoid any degenerate situations where it could synergize with itself and effectively eliminate some players from the game.

The next example I'd like to point to is a card that was removed in the second edition of the game, the card that replaced it, and the differences between the two. The removed card is Thief, its replacement is Bandit.

Thief

Bandit

Thief was underpowered, but that's not the only reason it was replaced. A dynamic I'd like to point out is that it lets you potentially steal a treasure card from each other player, which means its power level depends drastically on how many people you're playing with. This is a bad dynamic in general; a card like this can be underpowered in 2-player games yet overpowered in 4-player games.

Bandit doesn't have this problem. It still can deprive each other player of a treasure card, but the person who plays it always gains exactly 1, which lets it be balanced for all group sizes at the same time.

On Thief's wiki page, there's a quote from the creator about another change that happened during development:

Anyway Thief originally revealed the top 2 cards, then put the untrashed ones back. Valerie didn't like how, if you got hit with Thief and your top 2 cards were non-Treasures, then subsequent Thieves would also get nothing. Also there was the issue of remembering the order to put the cards back. So they changed it from reveal to reveal-then-discard. I was initially skeptical but in the end I think it was a good change.

Basically he's saying that with the original version of Thief, multiple plays of Thief in one round would all do nothing if the first one did nothing, but after this change, if one play of Thief steals nothing, it still sifts past the cards blocking it so that subsequent plays can steal something. I love the attention to subtle dynamics like this!