This is an archive of a past course's class materials from 2011. Present "Games & Society" students should look elsewhere to find their coursework; consult your current syllabus for more information.

The designer and intstructor of this lab course, Jason McIntosh, has written notes and commentary about this course which may be of interest to other teachers. You can contact the author at jmac@jmac.org.

GAME1111 week 7: Dominion

Return to the main GAME1111 page

GAME1111 Week 7: Dominion

Over the next three class meetings, we’re going to really think like game designers. In our first meeting we’re going to play and discuss the game Dominion, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino. Once we’re all familiar with how this game works, we’ll spend the next couple of weeks tinkering with it… but we’ll talk more about that once we get there.

Before class

You should know how to play Dominion. As with various other tabletop games we’ve played in-class, the best way to learn is to play, and once again a free online version of the game is available.

There’ll be a quiz, as usual, both on the rules and on the experience of playing.

Learning about Dominion

You can read a scan of the official Dominion rulebook as a PDF, or you can peruse this plain-text rules summary of Dominion in Word format.

This video review does a good job providing a gloss of the game’s setup and rules, even though I don’t necessarily agree with its opinions on the game’s strengths and weaknesses. (It does provide does good fodder for in-class discussion, though!)

Playing Dominion online

The games I link to below do not feature practice modes against computerized opponents – you can only play against real people! Be bold and wade right in anyway. You’ll probably lose a lot to these folks, but you’ll learn a lot too. Of course, you are welcome to coordinate with a classmate or two to log in at the same time and play together…

In class

We’ll reshuffle ourselves randomly into tables of three or four, then play for around 50 minutes. (If your table finishes early, feel free to get another game in). Then we’ll debrief.

A few things to think about to while playing: