November 25, 2011
Onward to the Land of the Hinters.
This evening, I got a chance to play with Hinterlands, the new Dominion expansion. There are a lot of those now! And my brother’s father-in-law loves the crap out of them. He brought the new set to Thanksgiving, so of course we had to throw down a little.
It had been a long time since I played Dominion. It was a ground-breaking game, but in a lot of ways, I’ve kind of moved past it at this point. It’s very simplistic, even with a lot of the expansions in play. That’s both a good and a bad thing, I suppose. Still, it is still an enjoyable gaming experience.
Hinterlands seemed to revolve around mechanics that made you discard a lot of cards, as well as cards that have an effect when you buy them. For example, when you buy Mandarin, you get to pick up all the treasure you played that turn and plop it on top of your deck. As far as discarding goes, you have simple cards with discard mechanics, like Oasis, which is +1 Card, +1 Action, Discard a Card, +1 Treasure. There was even a crazy victory point card called Tunnel, which let you take a Gold card every time you discarded that card in particular.
By far, my favorite card, though, was Fool’s Gold. It was a treasure that was only worth one… unless you play more than one copy a turn, where every copy other than the first one is worth four instead. I bought many of them and used them to great effect. I also enjoyed Oracle, which let you look at the top 2 cards of everyone’s deck, and decide whether you should put them into their discard pile or not, then draw two cards. I had a lot of fun with that one.
I didn’t eek out a victory, but it was a fun time. Dominion still has it! I’m not sure who besides Steve would still be buying expansions for it, but it is still a fun game that’s quick to play. Hinterlands certainly seems like a better expansion than, say, Alchemy, which kind of sucked. Although Dominion is not really the focus of my play time anymore, I’m never going to turn down giving it a go, so it was interesting to see what they’re still doing with the game.