Deckbuilding games that did something different

Dominion started it all. Did Donald X Vaccarino understand that he was creating a brand new genre when Dominion hit? Deck-building games literally didn’t exist before him. Deck construction games like Magic: The Gathering existed, where before you start the game you invest time and money into building a deck which you bring to the game ready to go, but in deck-building games you create the deck that you’re playing during the game.

As the original, Dominion set the standard for others to deviate from. Your starting deck contains 10 cards, and you draw 5 cards every turn, so you get through your initial deck in 2 turns. That’s important - your newly bought cards could be affecting the game right from turn 3.

Your starting deck includes some amount of money with which to buy new cards, and some cards which are worth points but do nothing else. When I was first taught Dominion it was by a Magic: The Gathering player who introduced the point cards as “Like the 17th land in your limited deck - you need it in there but you never want to actually draw it”. Later Dominion expansions would add cards that functioned as victory point cards and also had other abilities.

The money you generate each turn buys cards from the kingdom, made up of some basic stacks or cards that are present in every game, and a random (or curated) choice of other cards. Importantly, everything that you could buy is available at all times (at least until the pile for that card runs out), so the variation each game came from which cards you had available. Games would start with a bit of analysis of what’s actually on the table, but usually played fairly quickly once players had had a chance to scan the board and understand what cards they wanted to purchase.

The basic cards available in every kingdom were quite good - on the points side you always have Estates worth 1 point and costing 2 to buy, Duchies worth 3 points and costing 5, and Provinces worth 6 points and costing 8. With the end of the Province pile signalling the end of the game, the basic rules therefore lock 8 money as the standard to aim for.

It’s the basic economy cards where some feel the mistake was made - Copper that costs 1 to put into your deck and provides 1 money to spend, Silver which costs 3 to provide 2, and Gold that costs 6 to provide 3. The problem is that these cards are quite powerful, meaning the corresponding Kingdom cards have to be that much better to be worth buying. The “Big Money” strategy was exactly that - buy a Province if you could afford one, a Gold if you couldn’t, and finally a Silver if you couldn’t afford that.

I think your experience with Dominion comes down to exactly what you thought of the Big Money strategy. If you were having fun buying whatever to put into your deck and got beaten by someone playing Big Money - that’s a sour taste that could well have you declare the game “solved” and put you off ever playing the game again. If on the other hand you saw Big Money as a baseline strategy that always exists, the question Dominion is really asking you is “How do you beat Big Money with this layout?”

Regardless - I’m sure Dominion was considered a massive success commercially, with many expansions and standalone sets printed and a revised core set. I just don’t personally get it to the table much any more.

Thunderstone introduced a wealth of ideas themed around exploring a dungeon, using light to see further into the dungeon, and splitting the main player “currencies” in 2. Instead of only having money, which you can use to buy cards, some of which are worth points, now you have a second currency, power, which can be used to attack monsters in the dungeon, slaying them for points.

Having a quick re-read of the rules for this article, it seems Thunderstone was actually much more complex than I initially remembered, trying to bring the entire feel of an RPG to the deckbuilding genre - distinguishing for example between regular and magical attacks, having your characters able to level up after earning XP, and having to pair adventurers with weapons they are strong enough to carry in order to generate attacks.

For me this added complexity detracted from the game making it feel fiddly. I know that the later Thunderstone Quest apparently streamlined the experience, but I never played it to find this out firsthand. The concept was good though, showing that the deck-building shell that Dominion created could house much more complex innards.

However, the main innovation of having to choose between having a shop turn or a dungeon turn persisted nicely into…

The Resident Evil game dispensed with many of the complexities that Thunderstone brought, but kept the idea of having a separate shop for buying resources and a mansion, but now you could visit both in the same turn.

In this game however you enter the mansion blind - having seen your hand and worked out how much ammo (i.e. attack) you have, you make a choice whether to go fighting or not. Succeed and you win points, fail and… actually I can’t remember precisely what happens, but you take damage which could lead to you having to skip turns later to recover, or even die outright.

It is possible to just faceplant into the boss early though!

Sadly, this game is very much out of print, much to the chagrin of one of my play groups.

Puzzle Strike tried to do a bunch of things to the deckbuilding algorithm at once. I’m not sure that it succeeded entirely, but there were quite a few positives to come from the game.

Firstly, the game took a more directly PvP attitude to the game. Where other games have you racing to have the most points when some timer mechanism ends the game, Puzzle Strike put you in danger by stacking gems against you, which you ‘crash’ back to your opponent, back and forth until one of you can no longer keep up and is eliminated.

Secondly, I think Puzzle Strike may have been the first ‘deck’ builder to have an asymmetric starting deck - each Character you could play as had special Character abilities that went into the starting deck immediately, and lent a certain character to your deck. You might as such have access to easy defensive abilities, or the ability to wound your opponent making their draws lower quality. This was important because the asymmetry in the starting position leads to asymmetric pressures on the market - in Dominion both players could essentially use the same strategy if - correctly or otherwise - they identified the same strategy as “the best”. It’s harder to align strategy with your opponent when the starting positions are quite different.

Thirdly, this wasn’t so much a ‘deck’ building game as a ‘bag’ building game - David Sirlin realised that you didn’t need a deck of cards if you could instead draw chips from a bag. Nothing wrong with the concept per se, I just think there was a lot of text on the chips and it wasn’t worth it, but later games like Quacks of Quedlinburg were certainly inspired by this early innovation.

Ascension kept the idea of 2 separate player currencies, one for buying cards and one for slaying monsters, but created a randomised market where, instead of all of the cards in the game being available in neat piles from the beginning of the game, instead they were shuffled into one giant deck and dealt out into a small market, with a new card being dealt in to the market each time one is bought. Well, I say bought - Ascension also did away with the separated shop and monster decks, shuffling them all together. If a monster was available to kill and you had the power, or a card was available to buy and you had the runes, you could do both!

Of course, the downside was that you could have epic turns generating lots of power and nothing worthwhile to kill, or generate a lot of economy and have nothing to buy, but at least they kept the concept of some basic cards on hand that were always available to buy or kill. It’s just that, compared with the Dominion basics, they always felt like a poor backup plan rather than a truly viable choice.

I’ve never quite figured out if I preferred the static market of Dominion or the random market of Ascension:

On a static market:

On a dynamic market:

Nightfall took the PvP approach by having you attack each other with minions, and introduced an initial draft phase which players use to construct the market for each game. One innovation here allowed players to keep a card from the draft in their personal market - you still had to buy the card to put it in your deck like normal, only this time no-one else could buy it before you got a chance as that card was reserved only for you.

In the play of a turn Nightfall also had a nice colour chaining mechanism going on allowing you to chain cards together, potentially triggering chain effects or kicker bonuses for chaining from the correct colour. The chain wasn’t just for the active player though. Have the right card available and you could extend your opponent’s chain, having your card act before theirs, giving opportunity for counterplay.

Rather than chasing points this game had a limited deck of wounds. Successfully attack an opponent through their defences and you inflict a wound - the player with the fewest wounds when the wound deck runs out wins the game.

I’m fairly confident that Trains was the first deckbuilding game to look like a board game as it introduced a board, combining the deckbuilding core with a railway network building game. In this game the deckbuilding side of the game is slowed down by having certain actions you take cause waste to get added to your deck which you might have to spend a turn dealing with.

Unfortunately for the purposes of this article, I never played Trains when it was released, and have only recently acquired an unplayed copy that I bought for research purposes but am yet to get to the table. Part 2 of this article however includes more deckbuilding games that look and feel like board games, so I had to give a nod to the progenitor. And if I’ve played it in time for when part 2 releases I’ll be sure to update this entry!

Paperback took a completely different hybrid path and combined deckbuilding with word building. Hate playing Scrabble and having to deal with that J that keeps coming up and ruining your rack? Well, don’t buy it and put it in your deck then!

This game rewards both creating long words (which requires you to either be able to draw more cards to get more letters, or buy cards like CH with more than one letter on them) and making high value words, as the letters used contribute to your economy letting you buy better letter cards with powerful abilities or publish books which are directly worth points.

Paperback also shook up the market idea. The market is split into multiple decks, each of which is shuffled and the top card is available to buy. Stratified by cost, this means that cards costing 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are always available - no epic word goes unrewarded by having nothing in the market to buy - you just have no control over which 5-cost card is on top.

This is a great game to introduce the concept of a deckbuilding game to friends, family or whoever that might not be as invested in the board game hobby as you. There’s a certain kind of wordsmithing person that this game will appeal to.

I remember Star Realms feeling very innovative when I first played it - it made for a more PvP focussed game with some ships being permanently deployed to protect your base and soak up damage - not moving to the discard pile until they’d taken sufficient damage to be destroyed and providing a useful ability every turn they remain in play.

It also made heavy use of colour faction bonuses - many cards became better if you played other cards belonging to the same faction in the same turn.

Now writing this article I’m not sure any of these pieces were strictly new - Ascension had Constructs which stay in play until removed and also made use of faction bonuses, but the games are very very different in feel because of how those ships alter the speed of the game. I do remember feeling the luck of the market here though, if you couldn’t buy the ships that showed up before your opponent you could end up behind quickly.

There are many Star Realms expansions and a big box edition so the game must have been popular, I just haven’t played any of the expansions to be able to comment on where they took the game - if you have then let me know! Part 2 of this article will discuss the Star Wars deckbuilding game which was definitely inspired by Star Realms.

I’m unsure whether to lump these two lines of deck building games together actually, as my experience of playing Legendary and Legendary encounters is quite different, but I think the mechanical systems at work are similar enough that it’s warranted.

Legendary, the line which started with Marvel, puts a lot more effort into the construction of two decks before you begin the game - The deck players will buy from, and the deck enemies come from. The player deck being built from small modules shuffled together is a way to bring back some of that curated feeling you get from a static market whilst retaining the evolving excitement of a dynamic market. Synergy bonuses also work better when the deck isn’t being diluted by containing every card ever.

The enemy deck sets the pace of the game, bringing out enemy cards to fight and also advancing the main villain’s plot. (Or, the Big Bad in Buffy’s case). The game is semi co-op which is always a difficult balancing act. Essentially it’s possible for the game to win, but if the players win you can then declare which player was the most winningest. (Note for a future article - is semi co-op still co-op and is this itself a solution to quarterbacking?)

The Legendary Encounters line, starting with Alien, makes incredibly thematic use of the enemy deck - I’ve played Alien and The Matrix and in both cases I felt totally immersed in the corresponding movie universe. I’d love to spend more time analysing just how they achieved that - It’s some combination of evolving goals that match the plot of the movie whilst on-theme threats are being thrown at you to deal with, and specific thematic mechanics like the egg → facehugger → chestburster sequence in Alien and moving in and out of the Matrix in, err, The Matrix.

(I talked about the Alien egg a lot in my April fools-ish Top 5 most eggscelent games for Easter. Go back to that article and read the final entry if you missed it!)

Did I miss any key early deckbuilding-games that added innovations you adore? Is my history wrong - did I credit a game with an innovation that actually came from elsewhere? Let me know at [email protected]. Or, drop me a line to let me know how you want to interact with articles like these. Do you wish we had a comment section directly on the article? Would a Discord server to meet the other Curious Lynxes be more up your alley?

Part two continues with Clank! so stay tuned for that!

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