Which dominion expansion should i get

Coffers are physical coins that you can save up to spend in future turns, and Villagers are action tokens that serve the same purpose. Dominion Empires reshapes Dominion with Landmarks, which change the scoring mechanisms. Landmarks thus reshape the game in a fundamental way.

For example, buying a lot of Silver and Gold is generally a strong backbone of any strategy. But, if Bandit Fort is in the game, each Silver and Gold count as negative two victory points. Thus, players must somehow get rid of their Silver and Gold before the game ends, or find other strategies to build their deck altogether.

In addition to Landmarks, Empires introduces the Debt mechanic. To us, the Debt mechanic is fun at times, but nothing revolutionary. Dominion Seaside introduces durability cards : cards that stay in play to do something on the next turn. They are generally fun and easy to understand.

Seaside also introduces three mats : the native village mat, the island mat and the Pirate ship mat. These mats are only a minor part of the expansion, because all of them only relate to one card each. Pirate Ship mat and the Island mats are easy and fun. Seaside is one of the best Dominion expansions, because it has the best average card q uality. It just adds so many fun cards, such as Treasure Map. Once you find two treasure maps in your hand at the same time, you get 4 Gold cards on top of your deck.

Treasure Map is one of the best designed cards in all of Dominion because good players can really increase their odds of finding the treasure maps sooner.

Seaside is fantastic and probably the first expansion you should buy. It adds so many great cards while making the least changes to the game. Dominion Menagerie introduces several new mechanics, which we explain in detail in our full Dominion Menagerie review. The biggest introduction of Menagerie is Exile.

Additionally, exiled victory cards still count towards your victory points. But there are also ways to exile powerful cards straight from the supply, and then bring these cards back to your deck. This can for example be done with Way of the Camel, which exiles a Gold straight from the supply. Way of the Camel is also an example of a Way card. Way cards are also appreciated primarily by advanced players, because they introduce more decision points and ways pun intended to fine tune your strategy.

To use a Way card a player must play an action card and then choose to forgo the normal effect of the action card, to instead play the effect of the Way card. The Way cards are always available to all players and can be used indefinitely. The other notable additions of Menagerie are Horses , which function like single use cards that draw an extra card.

Players can stack horses in their deck to build up to a mega turn, or just sprinkle in horses for some extra cards here and there. And, the Menagerie expansion also adds some strong reactive cards. Reaction cards enable more interaction between players and this has been somewhat missing in other Dominion sets. We think Menagerie is a great expansion, especially for more advanced Dominion players. Dominion Adventures its most prominent addition are the Traveler cards.

Traveler cards upgrade to a stronger form every time they are played. For example, after playing the Page it turns into a Treasure Hunter. After subsequent plays it turns to a warrior, a hero and eventually a Champion.

The Traveler cards are some of our favorites, but keep in mind that they are best played in longer games. The other big introduction of the Adventures expansion are Events.

Each game is played with one or two events that are available at all times to all players. Players can trigger the events by paying for them. For example, you can trigger The Expedition event by paying 3 to get 2 extra cards during your following turn. Events are a very natural and fun addition to Dominion, which is why more events were added in the later expansions.

In our opinion the Events added in these later expansions are more interesting, but the Adventures Events are still solid. Dominion Dark Ages is a massive expansion that adds new cards with lots of cool interactions. The Dark Ages theme involves a lot of bad things happening, giving bad cards to your opponents, and trashing and upgrading cards. This expansion set contains some of the most creative cards of any expansion. Dominion Intrigue is the only Dominion expansion that can functions as a standalone base game as well.

Many Dominion players own Intrigue instead of the normal Dominion base game, because Intrigue has slightly more interesting cards. They enable more interaction between players, and they offer the players choices between different effects. This card thus gives the player much more room to maneuver than the more vanilla cards of the normal Dominion base game. Dominion Intrigue is generally a solid expansion with lots of fun cards.

Dominion Nocturne is the most popular expansion among Dominion world cup participants. This does a couple things. It shrinks the size of your deck, and allows for you to pull them out at the time you really wanted to use them. At first I felt that this mechanic kind of broke the feel of the game, but at the same time, pulling off an incredible combo becomes much easier and you can count on it happening more often than not.

Its for that reason that Adventures is a really fun set to play. It feels very different from a regular Dominion game, so if you are looking for a set that really shakes up how the game is played. Then this set might just be for you. A little bit of a controversial placement for this set to many, Dominion: Alchemy is number 4 on our list. Let me explain. Alchemy is the highest ranked small expansion on our list. With only cards in the set.

They are tied together very closely and thick with theme. A new currency is in this set called potions, and they act as a resource to buy other cards in this expansion.

I personally love the potions method of currency and the effects of many of the cards in this set. If you are a first time buyer, This set might be just what you need to change up the pace of the base game, and at a lower cost then the other expansions to the game which is important.

Prosperity was released in October as a large expansion with cards in the box. Dominion prosperity is one of the best versions of the game simply because of the amount of wealth that gets thrown around in it. There is so much wealth being thrown around in this version of the game in fact, that they introduced the Platinum currency cards which are more valuable than the gold.

I feel that it makes the game insanely fun and every time we use this expansion I find that we really get into it. All of these top expansions are must haves to your game if you are looking to get expansions and this is a fantastic place to start either as a new player as the rules are not to complex, or as a seasoned veteran to the game that wants to go through a bunch of wealth shenanigans that this set provides.

Dominion Renaissance was released in as a large expansion with cards to it. It also brings back the coffers that were first seen in the guilds expansion to the game. This set simply did it better. There is just something about holding onto those coins in this expansion that feels good as well. Renaissance contains duration cards, artifacts and projects.

Artifact cards are really cool with how they get earned and bring up and take down the value of cards that you are purchasing for your deck. Artifacts are cards that you can buy and essentially work for you until someone else buys a card that would take the artifact away from you!

Oh, No! Now decks have a variable strength. So it may or may not be worth it to get the artifacts, and that is something that really makes this set stand out to me. Another really cool part to this set is villagers, where they act as actions that can be banked for use on later turns. So holding onto a large amount of actions for the late game is always a blast. If you are able, you can build your deck even faster to get ahead of the curve of other players. Project cards are cards that you can buy and the effect lasts for you for the entire game.

This is a cool feature that really just adds more abilities and nuance to each players turn. This set just has so many interesting things to it and is a perfect set to look out for when wanting to have a slightly more complex game that offers many new features. You can pull this out for virtually any player and you will all have a great time playing it.

That is why Nocturne has been placed all the way up at the top here. Nocturne is a crazy set. Many games attempt to do day and night cycles. Games that I truly love, like the blood moon expansion in Talisman 4th Edition revised. This basically expands the amount of parts to a turn. At night there are no limits to actions and that is really fun to do. It also makes me feel mischievous doing things in the darkness to screw over the other players.

It takes the concept of Intrigue and blows it out of the water with theme and mechanics. There are also boon cards in this set that are activated by using bards that can be purchased from the purchase decks. The game plays with three of these and though they are activated via the bard, they play similar to events in other sets. These new mechanics can be compared to some mechanics in other expansions.

Because of that, it fits well with other expansions to Dominion. The theme of prosperity speaks for itself, money. The expansion introduces a couple of Treasure cards, Platinum and Colony, that are higher than the value of Gold. It also adds some Treasures that have effects when played and some cards that cost more but have better effects. Finally, there are also some VP tokens introduced that will give you VP points without a card bogging down your deck.

This is a pretty fun expansion but some of the others add more interesting mechanics. This was one of the earliest expansions released for Dominion and continues to be one of the most recommended.

It is a good expansion but gets brought up often because it is the one that most people have, so the recommendations are skewed toward this expansion. The centerpiece of this expansions are the new duration cards.

These cards have effects which do something in the turn you play them and the turn after they are played. This is the simplest expansion of the bunch. Cards that are added in this expansion give you choices of actions.

On top of this, the expansion adds some Victory cards that have abilities like actions and one that has Treasure value on it as well. This is a pretty simple expansion which is great for people that really enjoy just using the mechanics in the base game. The expansion focuses on cards that have some effect when they are bought. The new cards have a few different types: Reactions, Treasures, and Victory cards.

There are 3 new cards of each type. There are also several cards that focus on burning through your deck without using every card which can be a great strategy in Dominion. These two expansions were released two years apart but are now packaged together. Individually, both of them are some of the weaker expansions but there is a lot of value in this package with them combined!

Cornucopia is another very simple expansion. No rules are added at all. The cards that are added just look at how many different cards you have and do things based on that. Guilds, on the other hand, adds Coffers tokens. These tokens allow you to spend a little more in the buy phase. Another change to the buy phase with this expansion are some cards that allow you to pay more than they are worth. Over-paying for cards has an effect when you buy the card.