Daily writing prompt

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

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Today’s writing prompt asks: “What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?”

Other than reading and writing, playing games probably takes up the most of my spare time.  I do play some video games, especially ones my kids are into, and that we can play together, but my favorite type of games are board games.  I’ve grown much more interested in board games in the last few years after meeting a few people at church who play them a lot, especially some of the more complicated ones.  These are people who refer to Catan and Carcassonne as “gateway games.”  We try to have regular game nights, but differing schedules often get in the way.  But fortunately, everyone in my family likes to play them, and so we do, often!

Dominion is my favorite board game and there are good reasons for that: it combines a pretty simple basic structure with a vast library of card expansions.  Typically, on your turn, you draw 5 cards, and each turn has 3 phases that go in order, using the starting 5 cards and likely some others.

First, you play Action cards that do things like give you more actions to do, draw more cards, attack other players, and many, many other things.  Next, you have a Buy phase where you play Treasure cards (basically, money) to, well, buy more cards.  Dominion is considered to have popularized (if not invented) the “deck builder” type of game because of this mechanic.  You end your turn by putting all the cards you played and all cards in your hand into your discard pile, which you shuffle when you need to when drawing 5 cards at the start of your turn or at other times.  The rest of the rules are essentially to follow the instructions on the cards you play.  You win by getting the most victory points, which are on Victory cards you can buy.

A basic example Action card is Market (pictured above), which lets you draw one more card, play one more action, buy one more thing during your buy phase, and get one more coin to spend.  A more complex card is something like Jester (also pictured) which gives you 2 coins but also may let you get a card for free from the supply.  It might also let you give your opponent a Curse (-1 point) or some other card you don’t want.

Jester doesn’t come with the base game, but from one of the 16 current expansion sets (I have 7 of them).  These expansion sets, which typically have about 25 more, different cards, are what makes the game so replayable.  Aside from the Victory and Treasure cards, which are pretty standard from game to game, each game has 10 “Kingdom” cards that you can choose however you want.  I’ve played hundreds of hands of Dominion and it’s never been the same way twice, unless we really liked a set of Kingdom cards and repeated it.

And that’s what makes Dominion my favorite game: simple basic mechanics combined with near-infinite customizability.

Honorable mention goes to Wingspan, a game where you collect bird cards.

If you’re into board games, what’s your favorite?