Fun Kingdoms

Contents

The groom passes the cemetery

This is in a sweet spot of complexity to play time. Everybody, even those with a 2–5 start, will tend to buy a Groom because there’s a lot of good fodder for it. Groom kickstarts your engine and will then drive the game to end on piles rather than Provinces. With a couple of Grooms, even Wayfarer is open to Groom, so the only cards in the Kingdom that you actually have to pay for—once you have that Groom—are Catacombs and Emporium.

Despite the centrality of Groom, there is room to diverge on strategy. A traditional Village-(Green)-and-Catacombs route to big hands and big Money is not out of the question, since you can easily collect a lot of Silver with Groom and Wayfarer, but I consider Cemetery a pillar of the Kingdom. It is the only trasher, and because it trashes on gain while being otherwise inert, you can overdo it, but it is effective enough to make Poor House viable for buying two Provinces per turn.

With either of those two strategies, you need one of the only two sources of +Buy, and one of the few sources of +Action. Village Greens are the best source of +Action because both Storeroom and Catacombs can set off a Village Green passively, but Throne Room on the cantrips (Patrician and Emporium) is a decent second, with a weak payload. Depending on the routes others take, a rush on Island, with its dual side effect under Groom that includes a +Action, can probably win out over the engine-building routes. In the end, Tower boosts those who’ve played the Keynesian beauty contest best.

This Kingdom uses the base set, Dark Ages, Empires, Menagerie, Nocturne, Seaside (any edition) and Plunder. Of those sets, Empires and Seaside can be replaced here relatively easily. I’ve played other variants built around Groom and Cemetery, but this is my favourite, in terms of the network of possible connections.

The view from the citadel

This is my most straightforward attempt to build a Kingdom that is “big” in the naïve sense of driving players toward big decks, big hands, great wealth and high scores, without having a big force multiplier like King’s Court or a big source of VP tokens like Bishop. By design, there’s not much complexity here, but I like Tunnel as a counter to Urchin that only works without Lighthouse, and the trickiness of Jack of All Trades as the only general-ish-purpose trasher short of getting that Mercenary upgrade.

Broadly, I’ve tried to make the game long and the turns less so. There is an intentional crux getting enough money to buy the big drawers that make a stupid engine work, and the +Actions are so week that even a big engine won’t run forever. For the same reason, the Attacks aren’t strong enough to bring play to a crawl. There are otherwise three ways in which this Kingdom prolongs the game by its design:

1. Colonies take pressure off Provinces.
2. Barracks and Citadel both take pressure off the cheap +Action onramp piles.
3. Witch’s Hut and Hunting Grounds are mutually interchangeable.

This Kingdom uses the base set, Dark Ages, Hinterlands (second edition), Seaside (second edition), Renaissance (Projects only), and Prosperity (Colony and Platinum only). Although I love Tunnel, there is no one central card here, and you can certainly add a Bishop for easier pruning and higher scoring.

The rats take over the sewers

Sometimes Dominion will suggest a narrative. Here, innocent squires from the mountains grow up to be indoctrinated berserkers fighting a holy war against natural vermin in the sewers of the city beneath the great cathedral. On a technical level, the theme is trashing with small hands.

I like the paradox of collecting Rats when there is some hope of cleaning up the mess they make. Here the odds are better than even, with Sewers and Cathedral that are both cheaper than Rats. If you happen to start with a 2–5 split, Squire and Butcher leads quickly to Berserker and Butcher, and you can use that Berserker to get yourself some free Rats. Market Square monetizes the easy trashing while Trail soaks it up for benefit. Quick, harmless self-harm for the whole family.

This Kingdom uses the base set, Dark Ages, Guilds, Hinterlands (second edition), and Renaissance. I’ve tried it with Colony and Platinum, and with Shelters, but there’s not much point. You can skip Poor House to get less Dark Ages, or replace one of the trashing Projects with Capitalism to make Poor House easier to play and worse to collect.

When I was working at Volvo and playing Dominion after hours with Love Almström and Andrei Zavarygin, we tried many other Kingdoms with Rats, both with and without Sewers. Rats are the most fun when they’re more carefully tuned so that the +1 Card on trashing a Rats is a meaningful reward for breaking out of a dark spiral. This particular Kingdom makes that very easy, while a Kingdom with, say, Count (minor self-harm followed by an option to “trash your hand”) instead of the Projects is more double- or triple-edged: Extra brinkmanship.

Dark Ages is my favourite expansion after Prosperity. If you like the crapsack theme but you don’t like Rats, consider adding Death Cart or Cultist. If you want to add more dross instead, to challenge the trashing potential of the augmented Rats, consider Mountebank from first-edition Prosperity, which is too oppressive without good trashing. If you want the trashing extra classy, consider Altar with Canal, which lets you convert any card into Gold with a large investment up front.

Built for speed

This is designed to keep the game short. The main way this happens is to let personally beneficial choices have positive side effects for your competitors, especially in City and Council Room, while trashing is easy and beneficial. At the same time, Scheme and the abundant Village variants make it easy to replay your strongest moves. More straightforwardly, City and Fool’s Gold improve with hoarding, quickly emptying just those two piles without forcing everyone into a precautionary rush for early VP that ends up prolonging the game.

The Kingdom above uses the base set, Hinterlands, Prosperity, and Seaside. Only Fishing Village is from Seaside, and that is easily replaced. If you replace it with something other than a Village variant, hoarding City becomes even more important, further speeding up the game.

This variant reuses Bishop, Council Room and King’s Court, but adds nautically themed cheap and powerful Treasure: Loot from the Plunder set via Cursed, and a passive income of Gold via Pirate. Three cards here are from the Nocturne set.

Monkey plays into the theme of benefiting from other players’ actions, but does not reward hoarding. Pooka’s Cursed Gold gives you a running start, while Doctor is there for the faint possibility of overpaying enough to get rid of your excess Curses and Rats, which never works.

The swamp menagerie

Finally, a Kingdom that has neither a strong narrative theme nor a strong technical theme, but was fun to play casually. One viable strategy is to use Menagerie and/or cheapened Peddlers to get Swamp Shacks going. Once you have the surplus Actions from that, Wild Hunt becomes viable, with its built-in chicken race.

Perhaps because folkloric vampires don’t have a reflection, you cannot use Mirror to get Vampire, just like you cannot use Vampire to get Vampire. Also, only Peddler is great for using Cauldron as an attack, so the Kingdom is not too heavy on the offence. That keeps it moving quickly enough despite the random Boons and Hexes.

This Kingdom uses the Empires set, Cornucopia, Hinterlands, Nocturne, Plunder, Prosperity and the set Menagerie. While the latter set is expendable in this case, the card Menagerie is not. I like how the card, in keeping with the theme of the Cornucopia set, punishes you for too single-minded a strategy. Settlers, on the other hand, is weak here and easily replaced, but there’s a catch. For a stronger 3–4 opening together with Menagerie, you’d want to replace Settlers with a Treasure costing 4 Coin. Note, however, that if you do replace Settlers with something even a little more synergistic, such as the cantrip Harbinger, the game becomes more likely to end on piles. With Settlers, I have found that it ends on Provinces, giving you just enough time to evolve a funky little engine and use it.