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Archive for the ‘Card Games’ Category

Your ship has come in and your alchemical labs have borne fruit. Your Dominion is finally entering a new age in Dominion: Prosperity, an expansion for the hit card game. Use your new-found wealth to clobber your disagreeable neighbors into submission. Hire your goons and build your banks, quarries, vaults and counting houses to take control of the economy. Use your financial strength to prove that whoever has the gold does indeed make the rules!

Dominion: Prosperity is the fourth expansion for the hit deck-building card game that has taken the gaming world by storm since its debut in 2008. Being an expansion set, it requires either the base Dominion game or a standalone expansion such as Intrigue to play. This review focuses on the Prosperity expansion. If you want to know more about how the base game is played, please read our Dominion review.

Dominion: Prosperity is another expansion set that introduces a new theme and new mechanics to the game. As the name implies, this set is all about wealth and gold and shiny things. It therefore won’t surprise you that there are a lot of new Treasure cards in the set, as well as cards that manipulate or are affected by the amount of Coins you have. The new mechanics include the ability to earn Victory Point tokens during the course of the game, and effects that depend on the cards that are “in play”.

Lets talk about the Treasure cards first. There are a whopping 9 new Treasure cards in this set! And what’s more: Gold is no longer the most expensive Treasure. There is a new Platinum card that costs 9 Coins and is worth 5 Coins when buying stuff. It would be boring if all the new Treasure cards just provided Coin bonuses, but thankfully they have pretty interesting effects as well.

Examples of these Treasure cards include the Contraband card that provides 3 Coins worth and an extra Buy for only a cost of 5 Coins. It does however have the disadvantage that another player gets to choose a card that you are not allowed to buy. There is also the Royal Seal card that provides only 2 Coins for the same 5 cost, but with the advantage that all the cards you buy this turn go on top of your deck instead of the discard pile.

As mentioned earlier, one of the new mechanics is the introduction of Victory Point tokens. Previously, the only way you can earn Victory Points was to buy Victory cards and then add their values up at the end of the game. The problem with that is that you are filling your deck with cards that will clog up your hand and don’t provide any immediate benefits.

Things are different now that you have Action cards that provide immediate Victory Points in addition to having other beneficial effects. For example, the 4-cost Monument card gives you an extra 2 Coins to spend in addition to 1 Victory Point token each time you use it. There is also the Goons card that in addition to providing lots of benefits including extra buys and coins, lets you earn 1 Victory Point for each card you buy this turn.

Another new mechanic explored in Dominion: Prosperity is the focus on the “in play” status of your cards. There are a number of cards that provide additional benefits and effects after they have been played but before they are discarded. An example is the Hoard Treasure card that while it is “in play”, allows you to gain a Gold card for each Victory card you buy. Similarly, while the Quarry card is in play, all Action cards you buy cost 2 less Coins. The Mint card on the other hand has an opposite negative effect, forcing you to trash all the Treasure cards that you have in play when you buy it. This basically means all the cards used to buy the Mint gets trashed.

One more thing to note is that the game economy has been drastically altered in this expansion. Not only are there new Treasure cards that are more expensive and provide more Coins, there are also a lot of really expensive cards. The most expensive and important of these is the Colony Victory card that costs 11 Coins and is worth 10 Victory Points. Provinces aren’t the most expensive Victory card anymore. There are also quite a few action cards that cost between 7 and 8 Coins, but they come with powerful effects that are worth every Coin you spend on them.

Due to the new expensive cards, the economy in Dominion has changed pretty substantially, and games may take longer now that you need to amass more gold to buy those big cards. In addition, games are now less likely to finish due to all the Provinces being bought, again changing how the game is played. In all, Dominion: Prosperity is a step in the right direction, injecting new life (and funds) into the game and forcing us to change our strategies and keeping us on our toes. So get a copy of Prosperity as well as either the base game or Intrigue, and start letting the money roll in!

Complexity:  3.0/5.0  
Playing Time:  45 minutes
Number of Players:  2 to 4 players (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion)

You can read more about Dominion: Prosperity at http://www.ageofboards.com/dominion-prosperity.html

I notice that a lot of people are searching the internet for free card games.  Tens of thousands of people.  I’m guessing that most of these people are looking for interactive computer card games such as Hearts which comes standard with Windows on PC computers.

But there is an alternative source.  Just follow a few simple steps to find free card games the old fashioned way.

STEP 1.  Find a deck of playing cards.

There may be a computer application that is equivalent to a deck of playing cards, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about a standard deck of 52 playing cards, the kind you can hold and shuffle and deal.

You could buy a deck of cards in a store, but it wouldn’t be free.  So I would start by looking in your junk drawers and storage boxes.  A deck of cards might have found its way into one of them at some time or another.

Or ask relatives, Mom and Dad and Brothers and Sisters and Aunts and Uncles and Cousins, if they have an extra deck of playing cards that they can spare.  Or you can ask your friends the same question.  You might offer to show your appreciation by playing a card game with them sometime soon.

Or offer to do some work in exchange for a deck of playing cards.  Offer to mow a lawn, or paint a fence, or rake some leaves, or wash a car.  It might take several lawn mowings to earn a deck of playing cards.

(If all else fails, you can always ask for a deck of playing cards as a birthday or a Christmas present.)

STEP 2.  Find the rules of a card game.

Go to your local library and find a book that contains a collection of card game rules.  Check the book out, and find a game that interests you.  Look for a card game played by two or more players.  You can hand-write the rules.  This is virtually free, just the cost of ink and paper.  You could also copy the rules using a copy machine, but this would cost you money.

Or ask friends and relatives if they have a book of card game rules that you can borrow.  If so, borrow the book, find a game that interests you, and record the rules.

Or go online to look for card game rules.  If you don’t have internet access at home, ask friends or relatives if you can use their computer for a little while.  Or you might be able to access the internet for free at a local library or school.  If you can get online, go to a search engine and search for ‘CARD GAME RULES’.  Or just go to a website featuring card game rules such as ‘www.pagat.com’.  Once again, find a game that interests you, and record the rules.

(If all else fails, ask a friend or relative to teach you a simple card game that you don’t know or that you have forgotten such as Crazy Eights, Fan Tan, I Doubt It, or Oh Pshaw, or even Go Fish.)

STEP 3.  Get some people together.

You will now have to find people to play cards with.  That means asking friends or relatives if they would be free some evening or sometime during an upcoming weekend to play cards.  If so, set the date.

If you experience resistance, try a little begging.  Try to cry if you can.  That works sometime.

(If all else fails, wait for a family gathering and bring your playing cards and rules.  You might be able to play a card game with someone there.)

STEP 4.  Then with the cards and the rules and the people, you play a card game.

Seat the players around the table, and place the cards and anything else necessary to play the game (maybe a pen and a score pad) on the table.  Then, referencing the rules that you recorded, play cards.

STEP 5.  Evaluate the card game.

Was the card game fun?  Would you like play it again sometime?

At the same time you should ask yourself one other thing.  Did you enjoy playing cards with friends/relatives?  Playing cards is like playing board games or playing video games or playing parlor games like charades with other people.  There’s a lot of interaction.

You can find out what’s new, and what books people have read and recommend, and how the weather is.  You can smile when you have succeeded in choosing the right cards to play.  You can offer some praise when someone else has scored some hard-earned points.  That’s what the PC game of Hearts lacks.  You can’t turn to Sally and ask, “What’s your favorite TV show?”, and expect a reply.

If you didn’t like the card game, follow the above steps to pick another card game and get together with friends or relatives and play that game.  And if you did like the card game, then gather some friends or relatives together sometime soon and play it again.  Free card games.