Empires is the upcoming tenth expansion to Dominion. It introduces the Debt mechanic, Split piles, Gathering cards, and Landmarks. It also reintroduces tokens and Events.
Contents
Basic Supply Cards
- Empires is only an expansion, so no Basic Supply Cards are included.
Kingdom cards
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- The pairs of cards separated by "/" are Split pile cards: 5 copies of the left card sit on top of 5 copies of the right card in the pile.
- Castles are a Split pile with 8 differently named cards in ascending order of cost.
Additional materials
13 Events (1 each):
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Tokens:
Flavor Text
The world is big and your kingdom gigantic. It's no longer a kingdom really; it's an empire. Which makes you the emperor. This entitles you to a better chair, plus you can name a salad after yourself. It's not easy being emperor. The day starts early, when you light the sacred flame; then it's hours of committee meetings, trying to establish exactly why the sacred flame keeps going out. Sometimes your armies take over a continent and you just have no idea where to put it. And there's the risk of assassination; you have a food taster, who tastes anything before you eat it, and a dagger tester, who gets stabbed by anything before it stabs you. You've taken to staying at home whenever it's the Ides of anything. Still overall it's a great job. You wouldn't trade it for the world - especially given how much of the world you already have.
Trivia
Donald X. stated a couple weeks before release that Empires has a Roman flavor in terms of theme.
Pre-teaser
A couple days before the teaser (which itself would come a couple days before actual previews), Donald X. dropped some news on changes in layout of cards.
Well this is unprecedented, but I'm not made of stone. Here are some spoilers about card layout.
- A bigger font is used on cards that don't have lots of text.
- "They" is used instead of "he."
- +'s in the body of text are now in bold.
- Card texts are more carefully centered than ever before.
Teasers
Dominion: Empires has:
- 76 pieces of card art.
- 60 symbols.
- 16 red hexagons.
- 10 uses of "Setup."
- 2 Duration cards.
- 2 ways to trash cards from the Supply.
- An Action-Treasure card.
- An Event costing .
- A way to double your money.
- A way to bid.
Secret History
One evening on a vacation, I paced around, the only one awake, thinking about what the future could possibly hold for Dominion. Was there anything great left to do? I jotted down some notes, then typed it all up when I got home.
Of the stuff I came up with, a few things went together, to make a kind of Prosperity sequel. It would have more tokens, those seemed like they had a lot more life in them than just those 3 Prosperity cards. Some "bonus" cards of some sort would award at the end of the game, like Kingdom Builder scoring methods. There would be giant expensive cards that you could pay for later. There would be cards that effectively didn't cost a Buy to buy. Special treasures could be a focus again. And there were three or so other ideas that did not actually make it. I like to tell the whole story, but who knows, I might need that stuff someday. Anyway you can only fit so much stuff in an expansion.
Initially the big thing I wanted out of VP tokens was, cards you trash for based on the game state. So, they would count things that conventional Victory cards can't, like how many Actions you managed to get into play at once. So I tried several of those and well in the end there's Emporium (which just checks a threshold) and Triumph (an Event). The original concepts didn't work out, but there are a zillion ways to make in this set so it was not much of a loss. A key thing was to try to avoid "golden decks" - where you just make points every turn without pushing the game towards ending. So most of the token stuff is tied to gaining cards, or trashing cards, or will run out some other way.
I didn't try the "bonus" cards for a while. When I finally got to them, they initially didn't matter enough, but it was easy to make them matter more and that all worked out. I made more and more of them and in the end there are 21. It could have been 20 Landmarks, 12 Events, 2 blanks, but I had the extra cards so in they went.
I had Debt from the start (and it had been in the ideas file for years). The first version though was a word on cards, "Debt," that meant you didn't need the to buy the card, but went into Debt. The Debt tokens worked the same way as they do now. One day I thought of using a symbol, and the cards changed to things like "When you gain this during your turn, take [red coin with a 10 on it]." They were like that for a while, before finally I put the symbol into the cost. With Debt a significant concern was that you could just buy the card turn one, and if that was good it seemed like the game could be too scripted. So the big Debt cards always tried to not be good turn one, although it took a while to really get there. Originally the cards could all be bought with , and in the end some have costs too.
And cards that gave you +1 Buy when bought, I made a couple and then it seemed like, that was plenty.
One day Jeff Boschen complained that one of the Debt cards (an earlier version of City Quarter) was dominating games, that in particular you could always get all the copies you needed, even in a 2-player game. And I thought, hmmm, I could have piles that were only 5 cards. And then from there went immediately to, wait, 5 cards, then 5 of another card. And I tried some cards like that and it seemed pretty cool. You get to tie together the cards somehow. A big issue was making sure you would get through the top 5 often enough; not necessarily every game, but you know, not as some rare thing. So three are cheap cantrips, and Gladiator eats its own pile for you.
I had no plans to have any Duration cards in this set, then somehow tried one, and then a couple more. The original one didn't make it but there are two Duration cards. The objection all these years was the amount of rulebook space Duration cards took in Seaside, but in Adventures that rulebook space was small enough to not seem so bad to repeat.
Dominion is a medieval game; ancient Rome is not medieval. I remained wishy-washy on that issue, not quite wanting to go full-on ancient Rome. In the end the set is called Empires and has a bunch of Roman things. Roman empires were around for a while in various forms, extending into medieval times, so there.
Late in the going, Scott Colcord took it upon himself to get all of the recommended sets played. The recommended sets don't always get much attention and well these ones did make it to a table or two.
Empires started out as a kind of Prosperity sequel. And ended up as one; it has super-spendy cards (though you can pay for them later), more Treasures than other non-Prosperity sets, tokens, even a Treasure that makes and an Event that gets you 15 . One of Prosperity's less-obvious themes is player interaction; it ups the non-attack interaction to cope with having fewer attacks (which in turn was to make sure was reachable in enough games). Empires has that too. There are again only three attacks, but the 3 Gathering cards are all interactive, plus Chariot Race and Gladiator, plus Castles in that way piles can be; the split piles cause more competition for cards; and then some of the Events are interactive and many Landmarks are, and those don't even take up space in the usual 10 Kingdom cards.
I used every good Event idea that I had in Adventures. Still, why not try to make more?
tokens helped a lot, and I ended up with 13 new Events.
Recommended Sets of 10
Empires Only