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Tag Archives: Dominion

dominion
Evil Mike is in New Jersey for his work this week, but that didn’t stop Ben, Owen, and I from doing some gaming. First up we chose to play Dominion. We played with just the core set and randomly picked our 10 stacks of kingdom cards. In the first game we had a lot of kingdom cards that generated coinage. So it was no surprise when the game ended with the last 6 point victory card being bought. Ben got the majority of those 6-pointers and won the game with 52 points. I came in second with 42 points and Owen was right behind second place with 32 points. (Notice the symmetry of our scores? That’s the hallmark of real gamers. Or it could be just dumb luck.)

The second game we chose another random set of kingdom cards. This time we were heavy on cards that gave you extra actions and allowed you to draw more cards into your hand. I think Ben was the king of this. He’d play 4 or 5 actions, grabbing another 4 or 5 cards. Fortunately for us, all that card shuffling did him little good when it came to getting coinage to buy victory points and kingdom cards. Owen on the other hand, had a well-tuned deck and he continually garnered Victory Point cards. He didn’t end up with a lot of 6-pointers, but had a slew of 3-pointers. Owen won the game with 40 points. That would have got him last place in our first game. As it was Ben only scored 28 points and I had a measly 18 points. You have to wonder if Ben and I were even playing the same game as Owen.

roll
Then we switched games and played Roll through the Ages. Our first game was rather ordinary. I thought I could pull off a win by ending the game quickly. It turns out that Owen beat me by three points. Owen had 26 points. I had 23 and ben was dead last with 17 points.

Our last game of Roll through the Ages was by far the most exciting…at least at the end. Ben had rolled two Skulls on the dice. (This would normally mean Drought for him, -2 points, but he had the Development so he could ignore this.) Ben had three more dice available. If he could roll one more skull, it would mean -3 points to both Owen and I. This would probably win him the game. He rolled…and got TWO more skulls for a total of FOUR! This was Invasion or -4 points for him. Poor Ben. Owen ended the game on the next turn, but I still had one more roll of the dice. Although I didn’t have many points, with a lucky roll I could grab the Empire Development and game 13 points from it. I had six dice to roll. I immediacy rolled two skulls just like Ben. Ben and Owen both thought I should roll all of the remaining dice to try for one more skull. A -3 to both of them could win me the game. I didn’t listen to them and wasted my second roll. Now I was down to my last roll. I decided to follow their suggestion and I rolled all of the remaining dice…and got TWO more skulls just like Ben! That was -4 points to me! Oh the injustice of it all! (It was just funny when it happened to Ben.) Owen won the game with 17 points. Ben was right behind him with 16. I had a whopping 13 points thanks to that -4.

All-in-all we had a great time. We hardly missed…uh, what’s his name.

Chaos Steve

This week we played Dominion; an expandable card game where each player is trying to increase his dominion over his surroundings thus gaining victory points. This game has been around for a while and has a plethora of expansions. We played with the base set. It comes with 500 cards, but you don’t use them all at one time in the game. For each game, you decide which cards to play with. One interesting aspect of the game is that the victory point cards actually are a hindrance during game play. Each turn you start with only five cards to play. If any of those are victory point cards, they are useless and take up a spot where a more valuable card could have been.

The games go pretty quick and we were able to get four games done in three hours. Ben had played Dominion before with some other gaming friends, so he was very familiar with the game. He offered a lot of suggestions and comments during the games. We mostly ignored him, but occasionally he was right on the money. Mike quickly became the action card king and he played numerous combos that allowed him to play card after card. Owen had big trouble in a least two games. In one game his number of coins (used to buy other cards) was low, so he couldn’t buy victory points like the rest of us. The most wanted victory point card cost eight coins. Owen quickly became known for being able to get seven coins—always one short. In a later game he just fell on hard times and his cards where not kind to him. Even with all these problems he was last only once.

Here are the scores from the games:

Game 1: Ben 38, Steve 34, Mike 32, Owen 22
Game 2: Mike 25, Owen 24, Ben 22, Steve 22
Game 3: Steve 34, Ben 31, Owen 28, Mike 24
Game 4: Ben 36, Owen 33, Steve 28, Mike 28

Poor Owen was second twice, but couldn’t quite pull out a win.

Next time we’ll have to mix in some cards from the expansion sets and see how it goes.

Chaos Steve