Dominion Empires

[Prisc Chandola]

There are 12 Castles (2 copies each of Humble Castle, Small Castle, Opulent Castle, and King's Castle; 1 copy each of the rest), 5 copies of each half of each split pile (pairs of cards separated by a slash), and 10 copies each of the rest.

The Debt mechanic allows players to buy certain cards and Events earlier than usual, while spreading the cost across future turns. This can shake up openings, though most of the Debt cards are not particularly useful early in the game. They are, however, almost all quite powerful in the mid- to late-game, and players ignore them at their peril.

While the idea of more than one different card in a pile is not new, having been used in Dark Ages, the Knights and Ruins piles were each essentially variations on a single theme. Split piles, with two completely different cards in a pile, adds a new dynamic to the game. Having only 5 copies of a potentially key card adds competition, particularly in games with more than 2 players, and having to get through half the pile before being able to access the typically more powerful bottom cards also livens things up.

Empires is in some respects conceived as a sequel to Prosperity and shares many of the same structural themes: like Prosperity, it includes Victory tokens, a large number of Kingdom Treasure cards, several relatively expensive cards, and relatively few Attack cards.

I didn't try the "bonus" cards for a while. When I finally got to them, they initially didn't matter enough, but it was easy to make them matter more and that all worked out. I made more and more of them and in the end there are 21. It could have been 20 Landmarks, 12 Events, 2 blanks, but I had the extra cards so in they went.

I had Debt from the start (and it had been in the ideas file for years). The first version though was a word on cards, "Debt," that meant you didn't need the to buy the card, but went into Debt. The Debt tokens worked the same way as they do now. One day I thought of using a symbol, and the cards changed to things like "When you gain this during your turn, take [red coin with a 10 on it]." They were like that for a while, before finally I put the symbol into the cost. With Debt a significant concern was that you could just buy the card turn one, and if that was good it seemed like the game could be too scripted. So the big Debt cards always tried to not be good turn one, although it took a while to really get there. Originally the cards could all be bought with , and in the end some have costs too.

One day Jeff Boschen complained that one of the Debt cards (an earlier version of City Quarter) was dominating games, that in particular you could always get all the copies you needed, even in a 2-player game. And I thought, hmmm, I could have piles that were only 5 cards. And then from there went immediately to, wait, 5 cards, then 5 of another card. And I tried some cards like that and it seemed pretty cool. You get to tie together the cards somehow. A big issue was making sure you would get through the top 5 often enough; not necessarily every game, but you know, not as some rare thing. So three are cheap cantrips, and Gladiator eats its own pile for you.

I had no plans to have any Duration cards in this set, then somehow tried one, and then a couple more. The original one didn't make it but there are two Duration cards. The objection all these years was the amount of rulebook space Duration cards took in Seaside, but in Adventures that rulebook space was small enough to not seem so bad to repeat.

Dominion is a medieval game; ancient Rome is not medieval. I remained wishy-washy on that issue, not quite wanting to go full-on ancient Rome. In the end the set is called Empires and has a bunch of Roman things. Roman empires were around for a while in various forms, extending into medieval times, so there.

Late in the going, Scott Colcord took it upon himself to get all of the recommended sets played. The recommended sets don't always get much attention and well these ones did make it to a table or two.

Originally the Landmarks were all "when scoring" except it took a while for me to add the actual words "when scoring" to them. The first "6 VP per player" cards started with 12 VP, and I tried a few at "4 VP per player."

This time around I'm putting the outtakes in list form instead of paragraph form. I'm skipping some stuff mentioned above, and a few things that seem like I could maybe fix them up if I have to make more cards someday.

Regular card outtakes:- The first card in the file is a Witch variant that gives you +1 VP if the Curses have run out. That sounded nifty enough that it hung around for most of testing, though later versions triggered on buying a card. If you somehow got +1 Buy and then played it and bought two things, yeeha. Eventually the trigger started to seem bad, and then the whole card fell apart. And I replaced it with Enchantress, hooray, a happy ending.

- Right and a third one, a treasure worth , may trash it to pay any amount of for +VP. That one you cashed in of course, since you didn't want the big Copper. There were a couple versions; they were dominating and didn't seem worth pursuing.

- I tried several cards that cost a lot but let you go into , that tried to look impressive and in the end were too impressive. First up, a new extra-turn card. I also had double your in Fortune, and I felt like, double your , with +1 Buy, was like an extra turn but way way faster to resolve.

- One of the most significant outtakes was a treasure that gave +1 Buy and produced per Buy you had. So by default it made and a Buy. But with other sources of +Buys it made more . You could just play multiple copies of it and build up. If you think about it, it's like Bridge, but gives you the up front to divide how you want, instead of assigning per purchase. It turns out that's strong. For a long time the card seemed on the edge of acceptable; gradually I got sick of it. I put it in the Plunder slot and then killed it.

- There was a card that made each card you bought come with a Silver. For a while I thought there would be a sub-theme of cards doing things when you bought other cards. Also I thought there would be a sub-theme of making Silver more exciting.

- Treasure, name a card, worth per copy of it you have in play (cost ). A super-Coppersmith; if you name Copper it's a Coppersmith treasure, but you can name something else instead. It looked classic and got a lot of chances.

- Mine 3 times, with a cost. Then, trash a treasure to gain a treasure to hand - the same if you went Copper to Platinum, but usually weaker. It thought it had a shot, and spent some time in split piles.

- In the same vein as Farmers' Market, I tried a Warehouse. You draw N cards then discard N, N being the number of tokens on the pile. And could optionally trash it to take the VP. Farmers' Market made the concept work.

- There were cards called Barbarian, don't think there weren't. Here's one where they name a card, then trash their top card if it costs + and isn't what they named. Then immediately a version where they revealed two cards; revealing one has worked on a few attacks but tends to be too random. My memory is this attack just never hits.

- I tried another permanent duration; + each turn with the first Action card you play, with a cost. It was in the running for a big debt slot, it seemed potentially balanceable but was not as fun as the competition.

- A few versions of a hot potato - you pay to give it to the player to your left, and it punishes whoever has it (the Event, sitting in front of them). Again politics was an issue, but also it just wasn't creating good times.

- I tried giving Duchy an ability. It had to be a buy phase ability but that was fine; I tried +1 Buy + (but +2 Buys because you bought the Event). Discard a Duchy, get that stuff, cost . It sounded interesting and was supposed to make me consider getting a Duchy for the +Buy. It did sometimes, but didn't add enough to make the grade.

The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power.[1] By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23 percent of the world population at the time,[2] and by 1920, it covered 35.5 million km2 (13.7 million sq mi),[3] 24 per cent of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its constitutional, legal, linguistic, and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", as the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories.[4]

During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated,[5] England, France, and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England (Britain, following the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) the dominant colonial power in North America. Britain became a major power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East Asia and Southeast Asia were occupied by the Empire of Japan. Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige and the British economy helped accelerate the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence in 1947 as part of a larger decolonisation movement, in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire. The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain's decline as a global power, and the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolised for many the end of the British Empire,[7] though fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies, along with most of the dominions, joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states. Fifteen of these, including the United Kingdom, retain the same person as monarch, currently King Charles III.

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