Session Impressions – Dominion: Dark Ages

Hey, The Myriad Games Podcast review of Dominion: Dark Ages dropped!  I wrote a review for Dark Ages, but why would you want to read a musty old article when you can listen to the new hotness?  Huh?

The group, as a whole, liked what we played.  Hoju, Jeff and I all rated Dark Ages high among Dominion’s expansions.  Looking on Amazon and Board Game Geek, it looks like the public agrees with us.  Amazon has no 3-star or fewer reviews with 16 five-star reviews and 3 four-star reviews.  Board Game Geek ranks this at 8.45 out of a possible 10 stars with 711 votes.  Those are excellent scores.  Tom Vasel from The Dice Tower, however, said that “…if you’ve never played Dominion before, [Dark Ages] is the very last expansion I would ever recommend for you.”  What gives?

Tom notes that there’s a lot of different cards with a lot of different complicated abilities; which is true.  Out of all the expansions, Dark Ages makes a poor teaching tool.  The real ‘new player killer’, however comes from the expansion’s major mechanic:  trashing cards.  It’s tough to watch a new player to a collectible card game like Magic: the Gathering struggle with the idea that they will never win against a good player until they remove the unnecessary and bad cards from their deck.  These new players spend months shuffling poor and good cards together in their 78 card decks with only 20 lands.  That player might luck into an occasional win, but the odds are stacked against them when a player hosting a fine-tuned 60 card deck full of threats with 24 lands guns after them.  From an empirical level, the new player may understand what the problem is, but he or she can’t stop the emotional desire to play with all the shiny toys he or she owns.  That new player isn’t a fool… they just haven’t played enough Magic to feel comfortable not playing every card they own.

This same problem wriggles its way into Dominion, causing a gap between new players and Dominion regulars.  Dominion regulars may insist that, as you play, you should trash low cost cards from your deck.  But that sounds like bad advice to new players.  Every card in your deck represents an opportunity.  Why would you want to destroy your opportunities?  When those new players are reminded that high cost cards are more powerful than low cost Copper and Estates, and that your deck becomes stronger as it becomes smaller, allowing you to draw a hand full of Silver over and over again, they might agree with you based on your logical deduction.  But those new players also know that Dominion is a game of many different strategies, and, given the option, they would prefer to buy up cards that did not trash other cards in their deck.  What makes this an even harder lesson to impart is that sometimes that new player is absolutely right.  Sometimes Remodel is a better card than Smithy, but sometimes Smithy is a better card than Remodel.  Which cards are best depends upon the board set up and what other players are buying, not religious zealotry towards a single strategy.

It’s with this problem in mind that Tom Vasel insists that Dark Ages should not be shown to new players.  I’m of two minds on this issue.  I think Tom might have missed the opportunity to use Dark Ages as a teaching tool for new players, to help them get over their fear of trashing cards in their first few games.  Close to one half of the cards in Dark Ages talk about trashing cards, and the set gives healthy rewards to players who trash.  In the previous paragraph, we talked about smart players who could trash their cards, but chose against it because it wasn’t clear that trashing cards was the better strategy.  In Dark Ages, however, those smart players should catch on.  The game wants me to trash my cards, ergo, I should trash my cards and see what happens.  An otherwise real stumbling block in proficiency with the game has been stepped over.

My other mind, however, thinks that my first mind is self-centered and egotistical.  Players don’t enjoy trashing their cards, so why am I so bent on ‘teaching’ them a lesson they will learn as they continue to play the game?  Isn’t part of the fun of a game like Dominion the process of learning that game?  And if new players don’t enjoy trashing cards, why would I expose those new player to a set about trashing cards?  Sure, maybe that new player will ‘learn their lesson’, but would they enjoy Dominion more if that lesson was never learned?

Why, exactly, do we play games?  Do we play them to sharpen our minds, or to have fun?  Or is there even a difference between these two goals?  I’m not sure.  I am sure, however, that there’s a podcast review of Dominion: Dark Ages that you could be listening to right now.  It won’t give us any more introspection, but you might sharpen your mind and have fun.