Dominion, sometimes called Base Dominion, the Base Set, or simply Base, is the first Dominion game created by Donald X. Vaccarino. It was released in 2008 by publisher Rio Grande Games. The box originally contained 25 sets of Kingdom cards and BasicSupply cards to support up to 4 players.
The second edition of the base set was released in Fall 2016, improving wording and formatting on cards, updating basic card artwork, replacing the Trash card with a mat, and replacing 6 obsolete first edition Kingdom cards with 7 new ones. The new cards are also available in an update pack provided to allow existing Dominion sets to be updated to the second edition form.
You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion!
In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner. But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn’t be proud, but your grandparents, on your mother's side, would be delighted.
This is a game of building a deck of cards. The deck represents your Dominion. It contains your resources, victory points, and the things you can do. It starts out a small sad collection of Estates and Coppers, but you hope that by the end of the game it will be brimming with Gold, Provinces, and the inhabitants and structures of your castle and kingdom. You win by having the most in your deck when the game ends.
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.
The big thing is to add more replayability. There are six vanilla cards and probably five would have been fine; the obvious one to replace is Woodcutter. Woodcutter is a fine card for the main set but the other vanilla cards are all better. That means all of the +buy cards would cost but I can live with that. After that, Feast adds very little. Chancellor doesn't add much and would have been better in Intrigue (where it came from); the fact that it's a puzzler is way better in an expansion than in the main set. And finally there's Spy. Spy is slow to resolve, that's the big thing. Over the years I have learned that ideally Spy-type attacks don't have +1 action, or don't involve a decision, or both. Rabble is exactly what I want. Spy has +1 action and involves a decision, so you potentially make tons of decisions per turn. I like decisions but man Spy is not where to get them. It initially got to interact with two attacks that trashed cards from the top of your deck, and that's cool, but now it only interacts with Thief (in the main set that is), and that combo just isn't worth the slot.
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.
I think the new Intrigue cards are great, but Sentry should have been some different cheaper trasher, and I don't know that I needed both Merchant and Poacher even though both are fine, and Bandit may be too attractive to new players for a main set attack.