Dominion (Base Set)
Dominion | |
---|---|
Info | |
Type | Base Game |
Icon | |
Cards | 500 |
252 (1st) / 262 (2nd) (25/26 sets) | |
208 | |
32 (1st) / 26 (2nd) | |
Blank Card(s) |
7 (1st) / 4 (2nd) |
Other Card(s) |
1 Trash pile card (1st only) |
Additional Material(s) | |
1 Trash mat (2nd only) | |
Theme(s) | Simplicity |
Release | October 2008 (1st) / Fall 2016 (2nd) |
Official Rulebook |
Dominion, sometimes called Base Dominion or Base Set, is the first Dominion game created by Donald X. Vaccarino. It was released in 2008 by publisher Rio Grande Games. The box contains 25 sets of Kingdom Cards and Basic Supply Cards to support up to 4 players. The base set was also included in the Special Edition and both the English and German Big Boxes. A second edition was released in Fall 2016, updating wording and formatting on cards, replacing the Trash card with a mat, and replacing 6 first edition cards with 7 new ones.
Contents |
Contents
Basic Supply Cards
Copper, Curse
Estate
Silver
Duchy
Gold
Province
Kingdom Cards, second edition
Cellar, Chapel, Moat
Harbinger, Merchant, Vassal, Village, Workshop
Bureaucrat, Gardens, Militia, Moneylender, Poacher, Remodel, Smithy, Throne Room
Bandit, Council Room, Festival, Laboratory, Library, Market, Mine, Sentry, Witch
Artisan
Removed first-edition Kingdom cards
Chancellor, Woodcutter
Feast, Spy, Thief
Adventurer
Flavor Text
Cards Gallery
Basic Cards
Kingdom Cards
Removed Cards
Impact of the Base set
As the original game, this set contains the cards that serve as most players' introduction to Dominion. The cards are, for the most part, simple, yet compelling. Some of them, like Smithy, Throne Room, Militia, Gardens, Witch, Chapel, and Village, are important cornerstones to strategies and strategic discussions, and serve as archetypes for card categories. As such, other cards of those categories have their costs dictated by these cards, as they tend to be these original cards with something "extra." The main strategies (engine, big money, slog, rush and combo) all have their roots in this set, in the most basic forms of each.
The Base set now is often considered simply a gateway to the more complex or "interesting" sets which introduce new mechanics and strategies, but it is the Base set which won the Spiel des Jahres, and it is the Base set which drew most players into the game of Dominion.
The original Base set had a much lower percentage of non-terminal Actions than most of the expansions, which gave it a reputation as favoring Big Money decks over engines.
Alternate versions
Trivia
In other languages
- Chinese: 皇舆争霸 (pron. huáng yú zhēngbà, lit. struggle for the emperor's throne)
- Czech: Dominion
- Dutch: Dominion: In naam van de koning (lit. in the name of the king)
- Finnish: Dominion: Valtakunta (lit. the kingdom)
- French: Dominion
- German: Dominion: Was für eine Welt! (lit. what a world!)
- Greek: Dominion: Ο κυρίαρχος (pron. o kyriarchos, lit. the dominant)
- Hungarian: Dominion
- Italian: Dominion: Nasce un Regno (lit. birth of a king)
- Japanese: ドミニオン (pron. dominion)
- Korean: 도미니언 (pron. dominieon)
- Norwegian: Dominion
- Polish: Dominion: Rozdarte Królestwo (lit. a kingdom torn apart) (first edition) / Dominion (second edition)
- Romanian: Dominion
- Russian: Доминион (pron. dominion)
- Spanish: Dominion
- Swedish: Dominion
Secret History
Donald X. Vaccarino gave an interview to BGN concerning the design of the base set: the Secret History of the Dominion Cards.
Retrospective
The way to think of these things is, imagine the replacement cards. Let's say I just take out Woodcutter and Feast and put in Wishing Well and Coppersmith. Those are not top-of-the-line adored-by-all go-in-every-deck cards. But they still give you more to do than Woodcutter and Feast do.
It would be nice if Thief were stronger, but it already scares new players, and once everyone was new. There are some wording tweaks; Throne Room and Moneylender should of course say "you may." I would try coloring the coins on the treasures. The Trash card should be a mat instead.
There are people who complain about various other cards, but I am happy with those, so there.Second Edition
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
I can't trace exactly how it happened, but over time, I gradually built up an interest in revising the main set and Intrigue. The reasons piled up.
- It would be nice to have the prettier Base Cards in the main set.
- We could have a playmat for the trash.
- I could improve the rulebooks.
- I could improve card wordings.
- Hey I could actually replace some cards with better ones.
We couldn't replace cards without providing them separately. We could do that though, we could provide them separately. A small box with just the new cards. Two mini-expansions (that would go out of print when demand for them fell off).
In June 2015 I decided to go for it. I started thinking about it and talking about it with playtesters; I didn't actually test any new cards until July. Empires was still going on but that was fine, I would test Empires cards and slip in the new main set / Intrigue cards. Later of course it got to be the focus. Initially I was going to replace five cards and add one (there's space due to taking out the randomizer-backed base cards). I eventually came around to replacing six (and adding one) instead.
My goal with the replacements was to increase the number of decks to build, the number of things to do, while keeping things simple. Simplicity is tough with so many expansions but man I am pretty pleased with the complexity level of the new main set cards. The Intrigue cards are more complex but still pretty reasonable. There was the additional goal of just fixing any other problems I could fix, whatever problems there were, but the main goal was to have more things you could do.
Normally these posts just talk about new stuff, but today I also get to talk about the old stuff. Why did I replace cards? Right, to make the sets better. The main set and Intrigue have the most duds - the most cards that experienced players rarely buy, that usually aren't worth considering. Or, in the case of some main set cards, that just didn't add much to the game, didn't give you things to do. Seaside is 3rd but much better by this metric; after Seaside there just aren't many duds to speak of in any one expansion. I have big plans to fix wordings in every pre-Empires set, but only Dominion and Intrigue are getting new cards.
If I redid the main set from scratch, more things would change. For example I might do a draw-first Cellar like Warehouse because that's simpler. There are rules things: for example I might change how Reactions work. But I was just replacing six cards, adding one, and keeping the game compatible with all the expansions.
Actually, there's one rules change: the exact way it tells you to deal with shuffling is different. It now says, when you have to do something with more cards than are left, shuffle your discard pile, put it under your deck, then do the thing (or, put the remaining cards on top of the shuffled cards, same difference). This has no functional difference though (except with the promo Stash, which will get a wording to fix this when reprinted), and was already how some people did it. I changed that (from "do the thing with the remaining cards, then shuffle to get the rest") to clarify tricky situations like, what if I trash Overgrown Estate with Lookout - is the card I draw one of the ones I'm looking at, or what? "Do the thing with the remaining cards" worked a lot better when the thing was always "draw." The rulings haven't changed but now it's easier to see what happens. It's also easier to remember how many cards you have left to draw after playing your Smithy and shuffling (though I personally was already putting the 1-2 cards on the Smithy while shuffling so I'd remember).
In the end it seemed reasonable to also change three cards functionally in a very mild way. Moneylender, Mine, and Throne Room all should say "you may." It keeps you honest. You play Moneylender for some exotic reason (like making Peddler cheaper) but don't want to trash a Copper (that you do have in hand). You can get away with cheating. The card should either make you reveal that you have no Copper, or be optional so that it's legal to not trash the Copper (and being optional is simpler/shorter and so preferred). This essentially never comes up for Moneylender and Mine. It does come up with Throne Room once in a while though. It was a question, should the mini-expansions include these changes. In the end it seemed like, that's such a poor product - buying Moneylender etc. again just for "you may." I didn't want to be selling that to people extra, that didn't seem like an option. The options were not making the changes, or including the changes in the set but not the mini-expansion. I went with the latter and well I hope everyone is okay with that.
A similar thing came up for one Intrigue card, Masquerade. You can potentially lock your opponent out of cards (in a 2-player game) with certain combinations - for example, King's Court, Masquerade, Militia. Every turn you play out the rest of your deck, Militia them, King's Court a Masquerade, and they pass you three cards that you trash, while you don't pass them any. It is not an especially common situation, and most players who don't read up on these things in forums probably don't know about it. Still it has a fix - having Masquerade not include players with no cards in hand - and here was my chance to do it. I went for it. Again this is not part of the mini-expansion.
The plan was to update the base cards in both sets, but Jay started thinking, why not shift Intrigue to a regular expansion? Since Base Cards is a product now, you can just buy Base Cards and whatever expansion; it doesn't have to be Intrigue. People who want 5-6 player support can buy Base Cards; people who don't want it don't have to pay extra to have it included in Intrigue.
So all together the changes are:
- Six cards dropped
- Seven cards added
- Three cards changed very mildly ("you may") / one card changed mildly
- Base cards improved with art / base cards dropped
- Other cards changed to have better phrasings (that are functionally the same).
- Rulebooks improved
- A trash playmat in the main set
The base cards are actually better than the Base Cards product ones (which will be updated to match); they have art but reinstate the big symbol (but smaller). In some cases the art had to be nudged down to fit the symbol nicely. Platinum (in Prosperity) will actually get new art; there was no nice way to put the coin on or above the pyramid.
Card text will change for all sets prior to Empires (which already has these changes, so you can go see how you like them there right now). The different kinds of changes:
- Some wordings are improved to be clearer / simpler.
- We now use "they" instead of "he."
- A bigger font is used on cards that can use it.
- +Cards etc. in the body of the text are in bold.
- Layout will be more consistent and have better text centering etc.
A very small number of other cards may have changes. I don't have a complete list (and won't until all the work is done); the idea is to only do this when the wording gets a lot better and the change almost never comes up. It's not all the stuff I would change if only; it's really confined to nice improvements that only matter in exotic corner cases.
And Possession will change to also give you tokens, but that's already errata to handle Debt tokens. And Pirate Ship will have a wording that makes it clear it doesn't interact with Guilds coin tokens.
Recommended Sets of 10
Dominion Only
First Game [images] | ||||||||||||||
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Cellar | Market | Merchant | Militia | Mine | ||||||||||
Moat | Remodel | Smithy | Village | Workshop |
Size Distortion [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Bandit | Bureaucrat | Chapel | Festival | ||||||||||
Gardens | Sentry | Throne Room | Witch | Workshop |
Deck Top [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Bureaucrat | Council Room | Festival | Harbinger | ||||||||||
Laboratory | Moneylender | Sentry | Vassal | Village |
Sleight of Hand [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Council Room | Festival | Gardens | Library | ||||||||||
Harbinger | Militia | Poacher | Smithy | Throne Room |
Improvements [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Cellar | Market | Merchant | Mine | ||||||||||
Moat | Moneylender | Poacher | Remodel | Witch |
Silver & Gold [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bandit | Bureaucrat | Chapel | Harbinger | Laboratory | ||||||||||
Merchant | Mine | Moneylender | Throne Room | Vassal |
Dominion & Intrigue
Underlings [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Festival | Library | Sentry | Vassal | ||||||||||
Courtier | Diplomat | Minion | Nobles | Pawn |
Grand Scheme [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Council Room | Market | Militia | Workshop | ||||||||||
Bridge | Mill | Mining Village | Patrol | Shanty Town |
Deconstruction [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bandit | Mine | Remodel | Throne Room | Village | ||||||||||
Diplomat | Harem | Lurker | Replace | Swindler |
Dominion & Seaside
Reach for Tomorrow [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Cellar | Council Room | Vassal | Village | ||||||||||
Cutpurse | Ghost Ship | Lookout | Sea Hag | Treasure Map |
Repetition [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Festival | Harbinger | Militia | Workshop | Caravan | ||||||||||
Explorer | Outpost | Pearl Diver | Pirate Ship | Treasury |
Give and Take [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Library | Market | Moneylender | Witch | Ambassador | ||||||||||
Fishing Village | Haven | Island | Salvager | Smugglers |
Dominion & Alchemy
Forbidden Arts [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bandit | Cellar | Council Room | Gardens | Laboratory | ||||||||||
Throne Room | Apprentice | Familiar | Possession | University | ||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||
Potion | ||||||||||||||
Potion Mixers [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Festival | Militia | Poacher | Smithy | ||||||||||
Alchemist | Apothecary | Golem | Herbalist | Transmute | ||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||
Potion | ||||||||||||||
Chemistry Lesson [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bureaucrat | Market | Moat | Remodel | Vassal | ||||||||||
Witch | Alchemist | Golem | Philosopher's Stone | University | ||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||
Potion | ||||||||||||||
Dominion & Prosperity
Biggest Money [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Harbinger | Laboratory | Mine | Moneylender | ||||||||||
Bank | Grand Market | Mint | Royal Seal | Venture |
The King's Army [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bureaucrat | Council Room | Merchant | Moat | Village | ||||||||||
Expand | Goons | King's Court | Rabble | Vault |
The Good Life [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Bureaucrat | Cellar | Gardens | Village | ||||||||||
Contraband | Counting House | Hoard | Monument | Mountebank |
Dominion & Cornucopia
Bounty of the Hunt [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Festival | Militia | Moneylender | Smithy | ||||||||||
Harvest | Horn of Plenty | Hunting Party | Menagerie | Tournament |
Bad Omens [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bureaucrat | Laboratory | Merchant | Poacher | Throne Room | ||||||||||
Fortune Teller | Hamlet | Horn of Plenty | Jester | Remake |
The Jester's Workshop [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Artisan | Laboratory | Market | Remodel | Workshop | ||||||||||
Fairgrounds | Farming Village | Horse Traders | Jester | Young Witch | ||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||
Bane pile: Merchant |
||||||||||||||
Dominion & Hinterlands
Highway Robbery [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Library | Moneylender | Throne Room | Workshop | ||||||||||
Highway | Inn | Margrave | Noble Brigand | Oasis |
Adventures Abroad [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Festival | Laboratory | Remodel | Sentry | Vassal | ||||||||||
Crossroads | Farmland | Fool's Gold | Oracle | Spice Merchant |
Dominion & Dark Ages
High and Low [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Moneylender | Throne Room | Witch | Workshop | ||||||||||
Hermit | Hunting Grounds | Mystic | Poor House | Wandering Minstrel |
Chivalry and Revelry [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Festival | Gardens | Laboratory | Library | Remodel | ||||||||||
Altar | Knights | Rats | Scavenger | Squire |
Dominion & Guilds
Arts and Crafts [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Laboratory | Cellar | Workshop | Festival | Moneylender | ||||||||||
Stonemason | Advisor | Baker | Journeyman | Merchant Guild |
Clean Living [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bandit | Militia | Moneylender | Gardens | Village | ||||||||||
Butcher | Baker | Candlestick Maker | Doctor | Soothsayer |
Gilding the Lily [images] | ||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Library | Merchant | Remodel | Market | Sentry | ||||||||||
Plaza | Masterpiece | Candlestick Maker | Taxman | Herald |
Dominion & Adventures
Level Up [images] | |||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Market | Merchant | Militia | Throne Room | Workshop | |||||||||||||
Dungeon | Gear | Guide | Lost City | Miser | |||||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | |||||||||||||||||
Training | |||||||||||||||||
Son of Size Distortion [images] | ||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bandit | Bureaucrat | Gardens | Moneylender | Witch | ||||||||||||||||
Amulet | Duplicate | Giant | Messenger | Treasure Trove | ||||||||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||
Bonfire | Raid | |||||||||||||||||||
Dominion & Empires
Everything in Moderation [images] | ||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cellar | Library | Remodel | Village | Workshop | ||||||||||||||||
Enchantress | Forum | Legionary | Overlord | Temple | ||||||||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||
Windfall | Orchard | |||||||||||||||||||
Silver Bullets [images] | ||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bureaucrat | Gardens | Laboratory | Market | Moneylender | ||||||||||||||||
Catapult | Charm | Farmers' Market | Groundskeeper | Patrician | ||||||||||||||||
Landscapes and Additional Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||
Conquest | Aqueduct | |||||||||||||||||||