My take on the Dominion app is that it is a serviceable take on an old and dry game. Granted, I’m only playing the base game and I knew what to expect because I own it physically, but it is rather straightforward and vanilla. I will grant that it at least is different from most other deck builders with its piles rather than buy rows and it limits what you can do on a turn unless you create combos, but that’s not really enough for me to get excited. On mobile, I have Star Realms, Hero Realms, Cthulhu Realms, Mystic Vale, Ascension, Shards of Infinity, and even Puzzle Strike. Base Dominion brings very little to the table that I would call exciting. Will I play it? Sure. Will it be my top choice for a deck builder? Hardly. I’m sure the expansions help shake things up a bit but I’m not choking at the bit to drop miney on them. I’m not knocking Dominion or Temple Gate, but I have to acknowledge that Dominion releasing now is very different than if Dominion had released a decade ago.
I agree with this, but I also still love the game. It feels very straightforward in 2024, but when it first released as a physical game, it was like nothing else. Like the very best and most lasting games, it was relatively easy to learn, but it showed an obvious potential for strategic depth, especially once we learned there would be expansions–that other cards had been developed and were waiting in the wings. Games were (and are) generally short and make winners and losers both want to immediately play again. There’s a very suitable mix of strategy and randomness to keep things from becoming too repetitive. Players learn more strategy the more they play but can still be surprised.
And also like the best games, it very quickly inspired other designers to create games using similar mechanics with different twists and themes (many of which are very good unto themselves, perhaps even better within the 2024 context).
I don’t know what the designers of this iteration of Dominion could have done “better” (aside from perhaps have paid for the development of a new digital-only set of cards), though, as I started out saying, I agree with you that it’s less exciting for this to exist now than it would have been 10 years ago in this form. But, for me, as someone who’s enjoyed the game since it first arrived, I’m pleased to have such a polished version after so long without one.
Interestingly for me, now that they seem to be working on some of the server issues, I have never really played much of Dominion. I remember we had a bunch of deck builders early on that I played on iOS like Nightfall and that one with the maids? Most are long gone. I went hard into Star Realms for years.
So for me, this is kind of welcome as I never really played much Dominion.
Playdek had a few Dominion clones in Tanto Cuore and Penny Arcade. Nightfall was a bit different. I miss all three.
Oh yeah, that was the Maids one.
I don’t remember Nightfall well, that was the one where the cards were on like a horseshoe in the center of the board, right? I liked that one.
Yes, Nightfall presented on an arc. It was a deck builder but also card battler and you would have alternating attacking and defending phases.
I loved Nightfall! But the rules were not easy to grasp, so quite a few people gave it a pass. It came out in a time when we were quite spoiled by continuous greatly polished releases from Playdek (Ascension with expansions, Nightfall, Summoner Wars, Agricola, Flux, Tanto, Can’t Stop) plus a lot of other releases from different publishers, all in a timeframe of about 2-3 years, if I recall correctly. So that might be a reason a lot of people didn’t value it at that time.
As I really miss playing it, I hunted down physical copies of the base game and three of the expansions a few months back. Waiting for an occasion to teach it and play it.
Yeah, I saw Nightfall: Martial Law on sale at Ollie’s recently for $15, and almost bought it out of nostalgia.
Added some friends code from here and started some Dominion games…I suck at the game so please be gentle.
For some reasons, despite every other Temple Game game being technically perfect, I do not receive notifications…not sure why.
I don’t want to hijack the thread but I could use some help…are you aware of any game similar to Quarriors but still available (on any platform but better if on iOS). I used to love the game (and I recall playing it a lot online with some of you) but it sadly didn’t survive the APPocalypse and it was abandoned. I love dice and building.
Thanks!
At its heart, Quarriors was a deck building game, too. I quite enjoyed it as well.
These really are not the same at all, but some ideas:
Dicey Dingeons - more of a roguelike akin to Slay the Spire where your dice represent your abilities and you can collect them and upgrade them through each run.
One Deck Dungeon - Roll a pool of dice that represent your skills to succeed at checks. As you progress and level up you can receive more dice and more skills.
Elder Sign - Similar to the above. You roll Yahtzee-style to fulfill the requirements of the location and likely fail and have your face eaten by Cthulhu.
I’m interested in other suggestions because like @Pitta I miss Quarriors and I like dice.
I do thank you but unfortunately I already played all those games to death (I should have mentioned it, together with most of deck building card games)
Elder Sogn Omens is probably my favorite digital boardgame ever.
I love personalized dice….actually I think I love personalized dice more in the digital space than in real life.
Quarriors was quite unique in that, loved it.
I would kill for some other Quarriors like digital games (even licensed by WizKid).
You could just download Dice by PCalc and roll handfuls of custom digital dice, lol.
But I do echo your sentiments.
Not sure if it’s on iOS or not, but Slice and Dice might fit the bill. It’s on Android and PC (on itch.io) at least.
There is a game on iOS called Dungeons of Aether that is a dice-based roguelike dungeon crawl but I have not played it.
An obscure blast from the past came to mind when talking about innovative dice games, ever play Hostage Negotiator?
Dice based game in which you’re a hostage negotiator trying to calm down the abductor and work toward releasing hostages. It’s been a long time since I played but it was an interesting dice/card hybrid of a game in which you play a card to dictate your action but roll the dice to see how well it worked with some cards being much riskier than others (great results if successful but a huge penalty if you can’t pull it off).
I believe Hostage Negotiator is also the spiritual precursor to the newer tabletop game Final Girl, which I believe is a pretty popular solo game.
Slice and Dice is a great game. It might be the only game I have bought directly off itch.io and I come back to it all the time.
Browsing the Dice Tower YouTube channel, there is a What’s APPening scheduled to start 30 minutes from now for Dune Imperium. I don’t follow beta news but if they are looking at the app, would that seem to suggest that release might be imminent?
Edit: I tuned in for a second and Zee was playing in Steam so it has no relation to my query. I stopped watching because I don’t need to be sold on the game. Instabuy.
It’s in Early Access on Steam. Not sure how long and when the app version would come out after that, but I would guess it will be similar to Everdell.
They said it would be about 3 months or so when it launched in EA, which was about 3 months or so ago (Nov 14th 2023). I think the last big thing they wanted to test out was the War Chest feature and leaderboards which they just did a week or two ago, and honestly, the war chest thing is fantastic.
Possibly they’ve still got in app tournament to do in Early Access before fully opening the doors as that’s the only thing listed on the Early Access description I don’t remember seeing yet.