My opinion on replayability is pretty controversial, so you'll have to figure out whether fifty plays of a half hour game, not all of which were fun, is a lot or not.
This review discusses Dominion, the original base set. I’m also trying not to mention the expansions because a base game should stand on its own, not be a $40 piece of shareware. I’ve played 150+ games of Dominion so far, including the expansions.
What is Dominion?
Dominion is a game of cards, where you use cards to buy more cards, which will help you to acquire more and better cards, ultimately culminating in buying the cards that will let you score the most points (which are also cards). There’s some side theme and the cards have names, but that’s really all you need to know, and this description honestly encapsulates the feel of the game. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins; if there is a tie, the player who took the fewest turns wins, if applicable.
Rules summary
Each player starts with an identical deck of ten basic cards. A player starts with a hand of five cards, drawing from their deck at the end of each turn and reshuffling when the deck runs out. Play progresses with Actions, Buy(s), Cleanup; there’s an initial action phase, where players have one action to play an action card, to gain some benefits, which could include coins, actions, additional buys, or additional cards, among other things. Once a player runs out of actions or chooses not to play any more actions, they can play as much treasure as they have in hand during the Buy phase to gain additional coin to buy a card in the supply. The selection of cards includes ten kingdom cards chosen at the beginning of the game, as well as a range of treasure cards and victory cards. Once a player uses up their buy(s) or chooses not to buy cards, they discard their hand and any played cards to their discard pile, then refill their hand with five cards.
I don’t know who these people are, but they’re playing Dominion
The ten kingdom cards in the center form the basis for the strategy and replayability of the game. 629
There are literally millions of possible combinations, based on a statistic that is posted ad nauseam on these forums, and there are limitless combinations of cards you could buy over the course of the game. Almost all of these combinations aren’t very good, but some people will have a lot of fun trying out various mixes of cards, independent of trying to win the game. The kingdom cards range from the simple (draw three cards) to the fairly simple (put a silver on top of your deck and all other players must put a victory card on top of their deck or reveal a hand with no victory cards), so the learning curve is usually fairly friendly in terms of actually understanding the game (unlike most other games in the top ten). There are attack cards, which usually hurt all other players, and a reaction card, which protects you from an attack if the reaction is in your hand.
Although I’ve done my best to make the game sound simple, there is a lot of initial depth in putting the kingdom cards together, and a game that has depth based on simple initial rules would be a big winner in my book. A lot of that depth is gone once a person realizes that treasure is always there and is often better than the kingdom cards, but there are opportunities to pull off a killer combo with most random layouts. A killer combo that lets you buy victory point cards effectively is a lot more rare than the killer combo that lets someone play five time-consuming cards to gain a grand total of four coin, so the game can drag out a bit with beginners. There are also more subtle forms of strategy, like trashing (removing from your deck) the weak starting cards or clogging your opponents deck with useless curse cards; since the cards you buy over time are typically much better, you’ll be better off if your deck is based more around your new cards. Still, the game usually boils down to relatively simple combinations of 1-3 types of kingdom cards with a lot of treasure, and the complicated combos that would add a lot more replayability are usually lacking.
The game escalates over time as your deck (hopefully) improves, until you can buy the most expensive victory card (Province, 6 points) with some consistency. Most games center around buying Provinces, although some games will focus around picking up the cheaper one and three point cards, or scooping up the Gardens kingdom card (worth one point for every ten cards in your deck) when it comes out. Those games tend to be more interesting and thus are less common than the generic race for Provinces. 884