Dominion Online (ShuffleIt)
Dominion Online is an official online implementation of Dominion. It is currently run by Shuffle iT at this website.
Gameplay
Features
In Dominion Online, you can play games of Dominion against either a human opponent or a bot. A human opponent can be found automatically via a matchmaking system based on rating, or can be invited by creating your own Dominion table. By creating your own table, you can also customize your kingdom (that is, the cards with which you are playing). Automatch games do not allow specific customization of the kingdom, but do allow players to choose the card pools they are comfortable with; these are a mechanism by which inexperienced Dominion players can gradually introduce more complex gameplay mechanics as they get more familiar with the principles of the game. Players can also ban up to five cards from appearing in their automatch games, and "dislike" an additional five to reduce their likelihood of appearance.
Almost all Dominion cards from all existing expansions can be found in Dominion Online; the only exceptions are the 12 removed cards from the first editions of Base Dominion and Intrigue, as well as Stash, due to technical difficulties with its implementation. The removed cards from other expansions remain available under the heading "deprecated", but do not appear in automatch games.
Some features are still missing from the Dominion Online system, including campaigns and multi-platform support. These and other features are all mentioned in the priority list on the official Shuffle iT forums.
Dominion Online is available in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Russian.
Cost
- The base set is free for the public to play with.
- In addition to having free access to the base set, users are able to play with other cards provided that any player taking part in that game owns them. This is comparable to someone owning a physical copy of the game inviting friends over to play with their expansion.
- Everyone who owned one or more expansions on the previous Dominion Online system, by Making Fun, could play with these expansions for free throughout 2017.
- All other expansions, including newly published ones, must be paid for. Unlike earlier Dominion Online systems, the Shuffle iT system requires a monthly payment. If you did own part but not all of the expansions, you can subscribe for a reduced fee.
- The Core plan gives access to card pools 1–5 and costs €2.15 per month (as of September 2024).
- The Complete plan gives you full access to all Dominion sets and costs €4.30 per month (as of September 2024)
To these costs, you have to add the VAT (if buying from inside the EU) and a transaction fee of 0.35€. When buying a subscription for 3 months or more, there is a discount ranging from 2% to 15% depending on the time span purchased.
Ratings
Dominion Online uses the Glicko-2 rating scheme, and has separate leaderboards for 2-player and 3+ player games.
Praises and Criticism
Praise
- Immediate implementation of the newest expansions, including the ability to play with previewed cards. Rising Sun was the only expansion to not have playable previews.
- Subscription pricing model offers cheaper access to all cards in the short term
- Being available in a browser without the need to download any program, and available on all platforms
- A better matchmaking system than before
- Interface cleanliness
- Ability to undo and load old games
- Supports reconnecting to games when Internet connection is dropped.
- Ability to spectate in progress games
- Ability to continue resigned games against the bots
- Databse is available to DomBot on the Dominion Discord, allowing for a number of community developed features such as easy access to past game history
Criticism
- Cost - There are objections to the pricing structure, preferring the 'lifetime subscription' from Goko and early Making Fun.
- Confusing interface - The interface of the system outside of games gets critiqued for not being intuitive. Matching in particular often causes new players confusion with both automatch and creating tables being possibilities.
- Poor bot play - The bot, of which there is only one, plays very simple strategies and misuses some cards to the point of not being able to win even if the human player does nothing.
- A number of cards implemented from Renaissance onwards cause the bot to freeze if it tries to play them. The bot does not play with cards from expansions released since then.
- Lack of offline play.
- Incompleteness - Stash and removed cards from Base and Intrigue are not implemented.
- Unkept promises - ShuffleIt promised a range of features that it never delivered on, such as an offline client with a single lifetime purchase, better bot AI, and campaigns. These features were eventually implemented by Temple Gate Games.
History
For a general history of online Dominion implementations, see History of online Dominion implementations
In 2016 it was announced that Making Fun, after taking over a year to implement Adventures, would be losing its license. In its place, members of the Dominion Strategy Forum, -Stef- and SCSN, were contracted to create a new platform, to debut on January 1st, 2017. Their newly founded company, Shuffle iT, began development on their version of Dominion Online in early 2016, and entered into a semi-open beta in December of that year. It released with all currently published cards, including those from Empires and the new second editions of Base and Intrigue, except for Inheritance and Stash. It returned to a browser-based implementation, though a separate offline version has been discussed since 2017.
On January 18th, 2017, Shuffle iT added Russian language support, providing translations for all available cards, despite only the first editions of Base and Intrigue being published previously in Russian. This makes it the first Dominion Online implementation to provide support in a language other than English. German language support was added on March 20th. On March 31st, a leaderboard was added and Inheritance was implemented. On July 10th, Japanese language support was added. On November 16th, Nocturne was released, autoplay functionality was introduced, and icons were added to the resource tracker indicating which long-term effects (from Durations and States) the current player is affected by. The previewed cards from Nocturne were playable online as they were revealed during the previews week.
On January 19th, 2018, French and Traditional Chinese language support was added. On September 24th, the Guilds cards were updated to their second edition Coffers wordings and Coffers and Villagers icons matching their mats were introduced, along with several other updates. In anticipation of Renaissance's release, the previewed cards were playable as they were for Nocturne, before releasing the entire set in November.
On August 1st, 2019, Captain and Church were added. On October 15th, the 2019 Errata was implemented.
On March 18th, 2020, after a period of previews, Menagerie was fully released. On June 29th, development of more translations were announced, specifically Czech, Spanish, and Esperanto (these were never completed).
On February 21st 2022, a week before the previews for Allies, a major UI overhaul was released, prodcued by Ceviri, a volunteer in the Dominion community. Allies was released on March 9th 2022.
References