Like most people, Dominion was my first real experience in the genre of Boardgame style Deck Building games and really opened the door for other companies to emulate and yet hopefully evolve the mechanics to something that would remain relevant and fresh.
Being a very experienced CCG/TCG gamer for years, I always felt that the prohibitive nature of the associated entry costs to their players always limited the pool of potential customers that these developers and publishers needed for growth. Quite simply, the CCG/TCG market became so oversaturated with products that it became nearly impossible for most of them to survive at all; and with entry costs being so expensive in the popular/staple games, people couldn't sustain those costs month after month to stay competitive.
So when Dominion was released, it became a proverbial beacon of light for older CCG/TCG gamers who had given up the hobby or just needed something to fulfill at least a small portion of that cardboard stimulation in their collections. An all inclusive card driven game that reminded some of us of our days of old.
To me, Dominion has always been a really good game with solid mechanics and gameplay, but also one that was never punctuated with a strong subject matter nor emoted the kind of visual stimulation that I needed from it. Maybe it's my love of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but Dominion always really fell flat for me in its Theme, and has continued down that same development path with each successive release.
In May of 2010 I sold off my entire Dominion collection including it's 3 expansions and concentrated solely on Thunderstone, another Deck Building Game in a similair vein to Dominion. I really enjoy Thunderstone and love it's theme even now, but still feel that even after it's first expansion that it's just not as free flowing and fluid as Dominion and might not ever be. Dominion had a way of really rewarding players who knew how to build a good deck, where with Thunderstone's inherent needs to balance Village purchases with fighting Dungeon Monsters, it doesn't quite lend itself to that same fluid gameplay and style of its predecessor. Let me explain myslef a little more if I can.
Thunderstone is really a game of hurry up and wait. With less intertaction between village cards in an average deck, card consumption comes at a much slower pace, and sometimes you can go full rounds through your deck before you get the right combination of cards to defeat a specific monster or make a particular purchase. Whereas in Dominion I always felt like there was a constant progression from one round of a deck cycle to the next. 304
By your 5th or 6th deck cycle in a good game of Dominion, one could easily have a hand in the range of 5-12 cards in a single turn, whereas in Thunderstone at that same deck cycle a typical range is usually only 5-7 cards, resulting in much less interaction for its players. This is my main and really only concern that I have ever had with Thunderstone, and something I truly hope that the developers will focus on in future expansions. (See my Thunderstone Wrath of the Elements HD Video Breakdown here: http://boardgamegeek.com/video/2777)
What both of these games lacked though was the inherent ability to purchase as many cards as you wished during a turn without the need of specific card texts. Ascension and Heroes of Graxia both allow its players this unique option, and to me it feels fresh and intuitive and a step in the right direction. Ascension does it by the use of its "Runes" mechanic, and although the pool of possible purchases is extremely limited in comparison to all three other games, it changes the dymanics of the genre and really allows for some free-form deck building to take place without the restrictions of a "one buy" per turn system. Where Ascension sometimes falters though is in it's inability to really allow players to plan their deck building strategies from beginning to end. Whether good or bad is for each person to decide on their own, but Ascension is more a game of continual adaption to the flow of the game than trying to ascertain any type of long term planning, and that creates issues for a variety of reasons. The most prevelant of which results in the inclusion of a syndrome that I extremely dislike,"Luck of the Draw"; and in essence, Ascension can sometimes fall down that path quite quickly, especially in the two player games that I've personally experienced.
What one has to remember though is that Ascension is a brand new property, and does have some really wonderful things going for it as well. It's incredibly well thought out and polished for a game that was released by a first time developer, it's much quicker to set up and play compared to any of the other three games, and it has a good mix of mechanics out of the base set alone which shows a suprising amount of promise for its future. (See my Ascension HD Video Breakdown here: http://boardgamegeek. 884