Beautiful Domains

Castello Methoni did something pretty amazing, it filled me with joy when I saw the box art, I love the simple but vibrant image and find it very evocative. It happened again when I opened the box, the board has the same art style and the components are great, tactile and solid - we have avoided playing with the tan coloured pieces that come close to matching the walls when possible though.

Those of you who played Dots and Boxes at school will recognise a core area control mechanic that fuels this game as players try to set up enclosed areas and pounce on any misjudgement by another player.

By adding walls along the coast, black controls a five space domain with four houses, 1 villa and a marketplace

Once you're set up players take turns playing 1 or 2 cards from a hand of five, either to trade for 2 coins or to build walls, adding them to the board on the edge of areas that match the terrain type on the card. As they add a wall they also add a house (cube) of their own to the board on one side of the wall and an opponents to the other.

If they form a Domain (an enclosed area of walls) they must pay 1 coin to the bank for each space it contains and 1 coin to each player who has a house in it, but then get to claim it by adding one of their own towers. Where three houses of the same colour exist in a domain they are replaced by a villa of the same colour.

Additionally, if they have created a new domain adjacent to another they can annex that domain by paying the owner 2 coins per space, 1 coin per house and 5 coins per villa. You then remove all the internal walls and remove the other player's tower.

At this point I will mention that remembering these costs, particularly as they value things differently depending on who you are paying could have done with a simple cheat sheet of some kind - it would have helped enormously for the first few games. As it was I became the 'rules' guide every time an annexation came up with other players not able to do the maths themselves until they were already playing. In one instance this resulted in a player revealing a move that they couldn't afford only to see the next player immediately make that move.

Claiming certain domains will activate a market (there is one on each terrain type) allowing all players to trade cards of the matching terrain for coins from the bank and the owner a small income at the start of every turn.

You have a limited amount of everything in the game, houses, villas, towers and coins. Mostly we didn't hit limits for the pieces in your colours and were able to continue playing regardless, though occasionally getting a few houses back from the creation of a villa was useful.

Coins however, were a very interesting economy. You start the game with the players controlling most of the wealth and early on small amounts are passed between players, while a slow feed is sent to the bank. Later though as the annexations begin and money will shift in huge quantities between players.

In some games, the markets became a great area of contention with early land grabs being made only to see them annexed again and again. This resulted in games that felt very confrontational and particularly when the annexing petered out left some players feeling hard done by. With this annexing focus when finally players were able to hold a market the bank emptied quickly. In these games refusing to spend money could act as a defence against annexation as other players couldn't afford to pay for such activity and had no way to gain more coins to do so.

In other games where we formed larger domains initially the bank tended to be far richer and choices centred on opportunity cost, yes you could spend your turn gaining the coins to annex a larger domain later, but would you be better off creating a smaller domain now?

Overall through our plays, I got two impressions:

Firstly that I was often limited by the choice of terrain cards I had in a way that wasn't fun. This reminded me of the worst parts of Catan where you simply can't roll the number you need (no matter how likely), but that game at least offers you the option of trading for the resource you need, however unfavourably. I feel like this game needed an option like Ticket to Ride, with a market of cards but with the option to take them blind. Yes I'd bleed information by picking up the cards I wanted, but at least I'd have them. This might also allow me to focus in on the Objective cards that were to a large degree ignored in most of our games given the lack of control and how often things were annexed.

Secondly, this felt like a game with a lot of hidden depths. I honestly think that if you have a dedicated group who will play this game frequently you'll discover some strategic depths that casual players just won't get. I'm sure that there are tactics that involve where and who you place on the other side of your walls, that a game exists where everyone cagily plays along to coast or that there is a reason you'd choose to play 1 card instead of 2. I also suspect it's possible to map out and optimise which domains are worth annexing and what initial wall placements will force your opponents into coughing up an enormous domain later in the game.

Unfortunately, this is also a game that punishes errors pretty hard. In one game I created a massive domain for very low cost in the last move of the game due to an opponent's error - this formed a 15 tile domain worth 45 points and scored me an additional 10 for the largest domain before scoring anything else; the next highest total score was 48. There was nothing the other two players at the table could do about this; I was effectively gifted the game. In another game, a player paid 39 coins (worth 1 vp each) to annex a domain that was worth less points in a move that ended the game, the highest score in that game was just over 45, scored by the player whose domain was taken, largely for the coins he'd been handed.

It is undoubtedly a beautiful game, at its core the mechanics are pretty simple, and I think there's a more strategic game in there below the surface. It's a shame that there isn't a little more of that visible for a new player to find straight away.

Note that I was given a free copy of this game for the purposes of providing a review.