Dominion

Pretty much had to start here: This is easily my favorite game of the past year and one which I feel starts from a unique point. Sure, it has similarities with other games in that you're trying to collect victory points whilst balancing this with the need for money (treasure) and bonus cards (kingdom cards). This reminds me most of Puerto Rico (which I see has returned to the no.1 spot on BGG). But the whole concept behind building your own deck of cards and trying to get the right cards at he right time seems, to me, to be a pretty new one.

It's a game which has clearly been meticulously planned. I sometimes felt in my early games that the cost of some cards was not quite right but having played many times I see that I was wrong and if a card costs 5 then it's worth 5. I also couldn't understand why there were so many curse cards until recently we played a 4-player game and all the cards were used-up by halfway through.

Some of the best features of the game are: It's speed, most games over in less than half an hour for 2 players and 45mins for 4. The fact that it plays so well as a 2 player game and you have to change your thinking a little when there's more players involved. Its super-easy to learn and to teach, it's also a good game to introduce non-gamers to because it's so fast. And, of course, the enormous variability in the game, particularly if you look at the expansions too.

Any bad points? Well, in the same way that in Power Grid sometimes somebody gets an amazing power plant early-on and gains a big advantage from that, there have been occasions when one player gets cards which are "too good" at the start: I can think of two scenarios where this has happened, both in 2-player games: One is where on a player's first go they produce 5 bronze cards (having shuffled poorly?) and are able to buy a Witch, the opponent gets cursed to buggery multiple times in the opening rounds and is unable to recover. The other is where you acquire a lot of gold early on, can't quite remember how it happened but it made for a one-sided game.

But on the whole, Dominion is a near-flawless game and one which should be owned by everyone in the land - 5 stars!