Game 32: Dominion

 Dominion remains one of my favorite games, but my sons aren't such fans anymore.  I'm not sure if we played it too much when it first came out or if we got stuck in ruts with our strategies.  One son said to me last night that he didn't like how other people's choices overly impacted his choice for how to play.  (It also perhaps doesn't help that one son has too good a mind for strategy with this game and can demolish the rest of us but takes his own sweet time in doing so  .  .  .  that may just be part of the issue.)  I chose to play this game last night because we were getting together with friends, and I thought that playing with people we don't normally play this game with would mix things up a bit.  I'm not sure I got any good experimental evidence on that, as I set up the game very quickly and am not sure I selected a good variety of cards.  I hope somebody will play this with me more in the future because I do enjoy it tremendously, and I'm hoping the rest of my family will give it another chance.
 You can tell by the number of expansions we have how into it we were back in the day!  (And it did win the Spiel des Jahres in 2009, so we weren't the only ones who were into it!)  In terms of game counting, though all these boxes that take up a lot of space on our shelves, Dominion will only count as one game because we can pull cards from each of these sets into one tableau for play.  On the other hand, as you know you know if you've been following this blog, our hundreds of decks of playing cards will count as somewhere between 5 and 10 games as I count our favorites among card games with a standard deck.
 The above was my o'er hasty set up from last night.  In the two pictures below I want to give an idea of how many different cards there are to choose from in setting up the 10-stack tableau.  Each set up can lead to very different game play, which is why I think our family can and should give this game another chance.


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