Dominations Overview

❓Do you know 🏯Dominations 🏯?

To be honest I never knew much about it. Only that it looked like a cool civilization game, but I very rarely saw it mentioned anywhere. After some plays now I believe it definitely deserves more recognition and I want to highlight how it all works. Because it is quite a unique one – and also quite abstract in a good way! 😊

The heart of it are triominos! On your turn you place a triangle shaped tile and, according to the connections, it produces resources, which you track on your player board. You also activate adjacent cities which will make future turns much more productive. 💪

After tile placement you can either build a city or a part of a monument if you can pay the resource cost. Cities are very important as they raise your resource limits and are always part of your goal cards – and reactivating cities later will get you bonus resources. ☝️ You place cities on the middle of the triangle tiles.

Last phase of your turn is when you can buy a new mastery card. These square shaped cards give all kinds of one-time or ongoing effects that really make this game! 😍 All of them have colored half-circles on their edges that you have to correctly connect in order to place them. You start out with a campfire card and can build out your tech-tree with these mastery cards orthogonally. It is a really fun mechanic, but it’s also hard to do properly. And in the first game you will keep reading your 6 mastery card player aids over and over in search of what to take.

🧐There are a lot of nuances to every phase of the turn, but that is the basic gist of it. Place a tile, get resources, build a city and connect a new mastery. Might sound easy but it’s challenging to do well!

It is again one of those games where calculating how many turns you have doesn’t do it justice. You play 3 eras with 5 rounds each, which means you get to act 15 times in a game. That might seem little, but it actually isn’t, and games can take really long. There are so many things to consider and calculate – even without analysis paralysis you need to think possibilities over. But it is very satisfying as you piece together combos.

Review copy provided by Asmodee Germany.