Setup takes about two minutes once you’ve got the kingdom cards sorted, ten piles picked from twenty-five, and that random selection every game is doing more work than it looks like from the box. I’ve read complaints from people who tried exactly one kingdom, found it dry, and bounced, and I understand the reaction, because a single fixed set of ten cards genuinely can feel thin after three or four plays. The game only clicks once you accept that the real game is the metagame of which ten cards you’re even playing with tonight.

What sold me, and what I’ve seen echoed by a lot of players who came to this from Magic, is that Dominion strips deckbuilding down to its purest form without the collectible-card economics attached. You’re simultaneously building and playing your deck from the very first turn, starting with a thin stack of ten cards, and the resources available to buy improvements always feel just a little short of enough, which is exactly the tension that keeps a turn interesting. The witch card alone can wreck a game’s scoring entirely, curses flooding a deck and gumming it up right as the supply piles run low, and there’s a real edge-of-your-seat quality to watching the province pile count down in the endgame that a lot of deckbuilders since have tried to replicate and mostly haven’t matched.

Two-player is where I’ve logged most of my plays and it holds up completely, tight and fast, usually under half an hour once everyone knows their cards. Higher counts stretch it out more than I’d like on a weeknight, and downtime creeps in once you’re past four, watching everyone else’s turn while you wait to see what’s left in the supply. The rules-overhead is close to nothing for a game this replayable, which is rare. Five stars. This is still the deckbuilder I measure every other one against, twenty-odd expansions in.