Monday, July 19, 2010

Initial Thoughts on Dominion Alchemy

One of my sister-in-laws visited me a week and a half ago and I finally got to try Dominion Alchemy.  I had been dying to try this as I’ve been a huge fan of anything Dominion based so far.  I was very happy to see her bring this and she knew I would jump at the chance to play it.  I’m not going to break this down into a point-by-point comparison and evaluation, etc, etc.  I’m going to keep this as simple as possible.

Dominion Alchemy slows the game down by a decent margin.  Keep in mind, I tried this using 5 cards from Alchemy and 5 from the rest of the sets.  I’ll talk about that issue in a little bit.  Alchemy introduced a new kind of treasure to us, potions.  By gump, those potions can help you buy some handy cards, but in the end, they just clog up your deck.  The good thing is, cards that require potions are fairly cheap, so if you buy a potion early on you can utilize it a decent amount.  But you then have to question whether to go after more potion cards or not and if you get too many they aren’t worth that much to you.

So why does it slow the game down?  Well, the extra treasures you have in your deck and it seems that even the good cards you buy with potions are limited.  They don’t give you much in the way of additional actions usually.  So burn through your deck, you will not.  That being said, it makes you try and device new strategies based on that.  Do you even spend time on potions?  You almost have to, so it’s hard to calculate sometimes.

scientist

The next part is where I’m not big on Alchemy.  To me, you are best to do 5 cards from Alchemy and 5 from the rest of the sets.  Well, I love to just randomize everything and get a different experience every time.  With the other sets, if I only got 1 or 2 cards from them, that was fine.  With this set, if you only had 1 card from Alchemy it would be a “weaker” card since the potion would be a space waster.  And there aren’t a lot of cards in the set to begin with, so you would have to keep using them or just leave out Alchemy altogether.  To me, that’s a huge weakness that none of the other sets suffer from.

My final opinion, Alchemy is simply a “nice to have” set, but NOT a “Must Have!” set.  And considering the past expansions, this one is disappointing to say the least.  It does add some interesting flavor and ideas, but those ideas require you to utilize at least a certain number of cards from that group.  Maybe some will like that bit of change in Dominion, but to me it’s just limiting the game.  Let’s hope the next expansion doesn’t continue down this slope. 

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