What I Played Today: May 8

Dominion: Alchemy, Saboteur

The newest expansion of Dominion is out, this time a small expansion with only 12 new cards, but what new cards! The new mechanic is a special treasure card that can be used to purchase certain kingdom cards that are pretty powerful. I got to play three two-player games, once with all the new actions, and a couple of suggested combinations. The new cards are great, you want to play almost all of them, and there are some very interesting synergies. The Philosopher’s Stone is a great treasure that gets better the longer you play, the Familiar is a no-holds-barred attack card that can hurt without even slowing you down, the Golem is a fantastic card to play multiple actions with, and Possession is the ultimate screw-you card, which lets you take over the opponent’s deck and reap all the benefits.

Playing with Alchemy does slow the game down quite a bit. The first cycle is spent buying potions and silver in most cases, and some of the cards can really draw out the game. But it’s fun, seeing everything you can do in a turn, and a lot of the cards are really action-friendly, and I found myself running with a lot of actions these games.

Which brings us to the part where my opponent would like you to know that I lost all three games. While I was having a lot of fun trying out new tricks, I wasn’t on my A game, missing some essential tricks and chances. Oh well, it’s still a fun set, and I can’t wait to play with more people.

I also played a fair bit of Saboteur today. It’s starting to grow on me, despite being not that great of a game. It’s not incompetent by any means, and it does a lot of player-friendly things, but I find myself not looking forward to doing all the quests, and there is just WAY too much secondary content to do, it’s intimidating. Not a lot of variety either, just run to a location, set them up the bomb, run away. Snore.

But I love what they’ve done to Paris. Not a lot of places outside the US get this kind of attention; it’s always New York or LA that gets the full sandbox treatment, and being able to run around a city I’ve had a lot of fun wandering around is great. I was excited when I noticed that one of the missions had me sneaking through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which was awesome. The geography is noticeably stupid outside of Paris though. I had to go to a town in the country for a mission, and so I go to Le Havre. The thriving industrial port town of Le Havre 200 kilometers from Paris, which appears here as a quaint port town just a couple of villages over. Normandy is also on the map, and is practically adjacent to the Eiffel Tower...but space must be condensed, I suppose.