Game Night- Dominion: Prosperity

Dominion: Prosperity

Designers: Donald X Vaccarino
Manufacturer: Rio Grande Games
Year: 2010
Time: 20 – 30 minutes
Ages: 8 and up

First you need to know this is an expansion. You need to have either he original Dominion or Dominion: Intrigue to play, if only for the treasure and victory  cards. Second thing I need to tell you is that I really like Dominion a lot, so it’s really no surprise that I enjoy this addition. Dominion, is probably one of my favorite games.

Here’s the blurb for this one.

Ah, money. There’s nothing like the sound of coins clinking in your hands. You vastly prefer it to the sound of coins clinking in someone else’s hands, or the sound of coins just sitting there in a pile that no-one can quite reach without getting up. Getting up, that’s all behind you now. Life has been good to you. Just ten years ago, you were tilling your own fields in a simple straw hat. Today, your kingdom stretches from sea to sea, and your straw hat is the largest the world has ever known. You also have the world’s smallest dog, and a life-size statue of yourself made out of baklava. Sure, money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy envy, anger, and also this kind of blank feeling. You still have problems – troublesome neighbors that must be conquered. But this time, you’ll conquer them in style.

For each Dominion, all versions, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can “buy” as they can afford them. In Prosperity the central theme is wealth; there are treasures with abilities, cards that interact with treasures, and powerful expensive cards. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

We’ve played with the Prosperity set several times now. I have a few favorite cards, like the bishop who lets you trash cards for points. And some I hate , mostly because I don’t think to buy them soon enough. Overall, I like this one, but I think I like Seaside a little better.

Really though, the whole Dominion series is well-done. Easy to learn, fun, never takes too long. If I were buying them now, I’d start with Dominion, add Intrigue (masquerade is my favorite card in the whole game), then Seaside and Prosperity last. Of course, that’s also the order we got them in, so that may be part of it. I haven’t played Alchemy by the way, so I don’t know where that would fit in.

You can purchase Dominion: Prosperity at Amazon.

The copy we play was purchased by a friend and the above is my honest opinion.