Dominion

I have to say I do love Dominion for many of the reasons below, but it can never be perfect. Stating the obvious its a card based game, devoted to expanding a kingdom. Sadly you get no visual feel for the kingdom youre set to grow except for the tactile weight of more cards in your hand. Theres no sitting back and surveying your kingdom, indeed theres no way of even determining from two decks who has a kingdom of coppers and poor houses and who has a deck of gold and provinces. Counter intuitively as you become more experienced at the game it pays to have a more streamlined deck so that the better cards have an increased frequency of showing up and therefore deck size has even less to do with progress in the game. This of course makes for an interesting game where it can be easy to loose track of who is winning and keeps everyone guessing till the end, however in a game which advertises ‘uniting people under your banner’ you get very little sense of progress through the game.

Its probably the best card based game ive played, but it will never beat truly board based games. If im growing a kingdom, I want to be able to sit back and see grow! (Read: see it be better than yours).