Knights of the Cardboard Castle

No photos for this one as I hadn’t expected to have the time to get to CarcaSean and consequently didn’t bring my camera. Since Shan didn’t feel like learning any new rules or playing anything too taxing, we settled on the Seaside expansion for Dominion and ended up playing three games using three of the suggested sets from the rulebook. Since there’s not much point talking about the rules, I’ll go straight with my thoughts:

• It has a much more coherent theme than anything I’ve seen from Dominion before. Not that it really matters, but it’s still a plus point.
• I’m somewhat ambivalent about the extra bits. The metal tokens are nice, feel quite weighty in your hands and actually useful in gameplay. The card-specific mats feel a bit silly and it’s a bit too obvious that there were just included to justify the price. I guess that they needed to do something to help remind people about the different ways of temporarily setting aside cards and the mats are as good a method as any.
• The duration cards represent a new type of effect that are interesting to use and therefore welcome. I’d say that the different ways of setting aside cards represent a new mechanic as well, though this hasn’t been talked about as much.
• All three of our games felt very, very different, which is a fantastic testament to how changing up the set of Kingdom cards can result is drastically different types of playing experiences. Our first and third games went rather slowly, with the third one being especially excruciating what with everyone’s decks being heavily bogged down by Curses and Victory Point cards. Our second game was over in a flash as both Shan and Sean used Treasure Maps and both of them managed to pair them up quite early.
• Overall, I think I had more fun with this set than with either Intrigue (which I’d only played once) or the base game. I think that the cards in Seaside feel a little more powerful than I’m used to. The base set was notorious in that in many cases, buying a silver was almost always a better deal than any comparably priced Kingdom card. In Seaside, I feel much more tempted to buy and therefore have fun with the new Kingdom cards.
• When I first played Dominion, I liked it enough that I thought I’d buy every expansion. Now, I’m more hesitant, not because I like it less, but because I’ve realized that Dominion isn’t really ideal with just two players. As my experience with this session shows, a lot of the appeal comes from the interactions caused by the Attack cards as well as seeing and responding to what other players are doing. With just two players, it’s too much of a straightforward race and the mechanics aren’t deep enough to be interesting on their own.
• So is Dominion a filler or a game to stand on its own? I can’t really think of it as a filler because it would be frustrating to play just one game of it and then move on to something else. You really want to play multiple games of it in one sitting, mixing up the card sets all the time, and give everyone a chance to do different things and hopefully, to shine.