Dominion made it easy to build a deck...

Hello folks, today I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone... figuratively speaking of course :)

Yes today I am going to review not one, not two but five yes 4 different deck building games:
Thunderstone, DC, Lord of the Rings and Star Trek.

I have to start by saying that Dominion is the game that started the deck building franchise and many different companies have taken that game as their basis in creating their own versions of games.

What is a deck building game? Is it like Magic? or Pokémon? or any other card game where you have to buy and buy and buy tons of packs, starter decks and singles just to make the right combination of cards to create the outmost powerful deck to defeat ALL your foes... No, not all; a deck building game is simple and can probably even be taught to a 5-year-old... I actually did teach my 5 year old how to play DC deck building.

The one thing that sets the deck building game apart from the card games, is that you only need to buy one simple single box and if your friends are generous enough and will play with you often enough... maybe you can all split on the cost... why not? Yes every single box is identical so don't go buying 4 boxes of DC or Star Trek or Lord of the rings... ok there are expansions that can be added to or be played separately from the 'base' game if you can say that.

The premises is simple, you start with a simple starting deck of usually 10 cards (well this is the case for these games) which are usually composed of starter cards (in DC you have punch cards and vulnerability cards, in LOTR you have a hero's weapon, some courage and despair cards, in Star Trek you have Starfleet personnel and some gadgets and in Thunderstone you have some heroes and such). Now each game is setup quite differently except for the LOTR and DC since they are all made from the same company which is a bit redundant but still gives you different gameplay value.

Let's start with Lord of the Rings (2 to 5 players):

Setup: Like I said before you get 10 cards that are given out to the players (all the same cards except that here if you choose one of the many heroes (like Aragorn, Gimli, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, etc.) you also get a special hero card which is usually an item or a maneuver card). Then you place the Corruption cards in a separate pile, the Arch enemies in a separate pile (now there is an impossible mode with the arch enemies but I frankly have not tried yet but I will soon because supposedly it is a good challenge for long time players), the valor cards into a separate pile and finally all the rest of the cards are put into a main deck which will be used to fill in the blank spaces on the table (I will get to that soon).

Once this is done, you take the top 5 cards from the main deck and lie them face up so everyone can see and this is where the game begins. So each player draws a starting hand of 5 cards from their deck and any cards that have power options on them, make it that you can purchase cards from the lineup, however, once you are done your turn, you must draw a new set of 5 cards (after discarding you previous hand, even the cards you did not use) and reveal a new card for the lineup from the main deck. Now here you could get an enemy (not the same as an arch enemy) that has an AMBUSH keyword on it... this will affect the current player directly... it could mean you lose a card, gain a corruption and so on; not usually good things, however again there are cards you can purchase have a defense capability to block these ambushes.

Each player does this one after the other and play continues on until someone decides to try and fight the current Arch Enemy. To do this, you need to have more power than what the cost of the card is (kind of like their hit points). If you can accomplish, this arch enemy now becomes part of your deck (just like any cards you picked up from the lineup) and now you must discard your current hand and played cards and draw a new hand and then flip over the next arch enemy... now they have group ambush on them which affects everyone playing unless they have a defense card.

As you can see, I currently have 2 versions of LOTR deck building games, one is the Fellowship of the ring and the other is the Two Towers (they actually have the heroes accordingly as well - you will not find Faramir in the first set and you won't find Boromir in the second set). Now they can be played as separate games (which I actually recommend) or you can mix them together to make one giant game (the rules on how to do this are included with the Two Towers set).

In the first one you have 1 way of losing the game (not including not being the player with the most victory points); run out of cards in the main deck; SIMPLE. In the second one, there are 2 ways to lose; run out of cards in the main deck or run out of cards in the WALL deck (yes there is the Hornburg wall that is part of the second set rules and once it is breached, more problems can occur to the players) .

How to win, simple defeat all the arch enemies and you all win the game, but there still has to be a single winner right? Well count up those victory points and see who did the best at building their deck.

DC deck building (2 to 5 players):

This is pretty much the same as Lord of the Rings, except that the heroes themselves have a super power on the hero card so you don't get that special card with your starting deck. You still get the starter cards and the piles of other cards are separated (super villains, kick, weakness, and the main deck). Same rules, you use power to buy cards and use power to defeat the super villains. The one difference is that when a villain is put into the lineup from the main deck, they don't have ambushes like in the LOTR, but they do have attacks for when you play them as part of your hand against other players. So again you lose by depleting the main deck or you win by defeating all super villains and you have a single winner by victory points (see not much difference - but gives you the choice of games with similar rules).

Both of theses games were created by Cryptozoic and frankly I really liked both versions (I talk about LOTR as one because they are simply add-ons). They offer tons of replay value because the super villains or archenemies never come out the same way, the hero you randomly choose at the beginning of the game makes it that your deck will change almost every game and once you play often enough, you get to know the best combos to play. There is eventually going to be an add-on to the DC game called "Heroes Unite" that will see Nightwing, Hawkman and others join forces with the current game. There is also supposed to be a third add-on game for LOTR but I have not seen any news on when that is going to happen.

So all in all, these two games each get 5 out of 5 dice... (the pics were just too big).

Moving on to Star Trek (this set also includes the add-on).

"Space, the final frontier" well you know how it goes.
Yes they made a Star Trek deck building game and why not... it is based on the same concept as LOTR and DC but it is quite different and can be played for a long time and they added different scenarios so you can play co-op. I do have to complain about the size of the box(es). As you can see in the picture to the left, there is tons of room and I have the base set and expansion in here... they filled in the blanks with styrofoam inserts (which I actually used in the Thunderstone box because there too is a lot of wasted space - I will talk about this later). The box is really sturdy though and could hold a lot of cards, now there is another expansion or a base set for the Original series, but I never saw the original series and frankly I loved TNG.

The setup is practically the same as the two other games:
You have your starting deck which includes a few ensigns and lieutenants and a few extra gizmos that help you get started on decking building quickly.
You have the main deck which contains characters, weapons, events, etc. and I believe there has to be at least 500 cards in there... well ok maybe not, there sure are a lot of cards. Oh yeah this main deck fills the empty whole in the Starbase area... which is a setup of 9 face up cards that you can purchase with XP points (not power).

Then you have the mission deck which is filled with mysterious adventures, missions, starships which you can either attack or try and diplomacy so that you can take it as your own starship (trust me, you will want to get a new starship once you see the crappy starter one you start with), wars and so on.





Finally, there are three piles for the ensigns, lieutenants and commanders you can purchase and add to your deck in order to use to buy future cards (you can pretty only buy cards using these three types of cards so make sure you have a good stock of them... however there are also come cards and characters that allow you to upgrade a card for another).

The player turns are rather simple but could get confusing at times... first you draw five cards and you can either do the following (in any order):
1- Search - which means you select a card in the starbase area and discard and replace it with a new card from the main deck (some cards let you do this more than once).
2- Purchase - buy cards from starbase or from the three other piles (ensigns, lieutenants or commanders) and add them to your deck.
3- Explore - which allows you to flip over the top card of the mission deck and attempt to win victory points by completing the goal or mission, withstanding an event, winning a war or defeating or diplomacy a starship.
4- Trash - this means you can simply take a card from your hand and trash it; no longer use it. This sometimes comes in handy if you have too many ensigns clogging up your hand.

I won't go into the exact details of the rules, so please read them carefully or search the Internet for video tutorials (which is what I do for most of my games).

This one I thought I was going to get my wife to play along because she is a huge Star Trek fan, but she actually has not tried it, however she did try the DC game and really liked that one (but in all fairness, my wife is NOT a gamer like I am). When I read the rules I found it a little hard to understand, now I mentioned before about different game versions in this game, well there are two extra scenarios where you faceoff as a team against the Borg, there are missions involving the Klingon civil war and the Romulans... for each of these scenarios, there are extra cards that need to be in the mission deck and certain starter starships to use. I have to be honest, I have not played any of the other versions but I do intend on doing so soon.

I really like this game as well, it was fun once you got into it and understood everything you could do... one think I liked, was the fact that the game did not end until someone reached 400 victory points via the mission deck, so even if the main deck ran out of cards, you simply reshuffled them and started all over. A two player game can be short, but a 5 or more player game can be long but still a lot of fun. It is fun to see all the characters from the TNG shows and the movies that involve the TNG crew... and even sometimes you will fall upon the picture of a character on a card that you will recognize the face and say "Hey this actor played another Star Trek character in another show."

I do have to say, though, that there are some really useless cards in this game, I am sure if it is because I don't really know what they do, but I just find they are cards no one would actually want to have in their decks...

All in all this game will get 3.5 dice out of 5.

Finally, THUNDERSTONE... I am sure most of you know this game as the Advanced version, well the one I have is the starter set and let me tell you, it really is a starter set... they really want you to purchase the expansions just so you can actually use some of the cool stuff this box offers...

 

Ok the great thing about this box, not the game, is that it comes with really nice dividers for all the different kinds of cards, but as I mentioned before, waste of space if you do not intend on getting the expansions... see on the right, look those are the foam inserts from Star Trek just waiting to be replaced with more cards; oh and look at that centre hole just begging to be filled by something cool... I don't know what that could be but anyways.

Onto the review... this one is a bit more complex and the goal is to the defeat the red dragon that is protecting the Thunderstone in the caves... I really suggest you read ALL the rules or play with someone who really knows what they are doing.

You start the game with basic cards and the setup of the game is quite complicated because you have to setup based on setup cards you draw beforehand... long story short, it took about 30 minutes just to set this game up... and about 2 hours to play and that was on the short version...
Now, once again you have an area (called the village) where you can buy heroes, upgrades, weapons, items and so on in order to help you defeat monsters in the cave. To enter the cave you need a torch card or a card that shows a number of torches it is worth... the more torches you play the less power you need to defeat a monster in the cave... simply put, if you enter a cave without a torch, the first monster will get a +2 power advantage, the second monster will get a +4, the next on a +6 and finally a +8 on the last guy, so if you can amass a good number of torches you can avoid these add-on powers (I hope I got that right, I don't feel like peeling through the actual rule book right now).

So you keep buying cards and entering the cave to defeat enemies in order to win the game... you only lose if, once the dragon appears, makes it's way to the first position of the cave. Simple no... well it is once you start playing.

Frankly I was hoping for something a bit more similar to LOTR and DC or even to Star Trek, but I was a tad disappointed in this one. However, if you are into it and want to proceed on adding the expansions, it might have a great replay value because right now the purpose is to destroy the dragon and that is all... and I find the cards that can make up the village area are a little weak in my opinion.

So this game will get a 2 dice out of 5.

Well that is all for now, hope you enjoyed reading about these deck building games and I hope that you will even choose to try some of them or even purchase them...

Don't forget to leave comments or questions below the post so I can have a view of what people are hoping to get from these posts.

Thanks and build on...

Games provided by and available at: Multizone

181 rue Principale Gatineau
819-685-3399

140 Boulevard Gréber Gatineau
 819-561-1411