Dominion Build the engine, beat the table

There is no deck to bring. You start each game with ten weak cards, and every turn you buy more from a shared tableau of ten kingdom stacks. The trick is choosing which ones: a Market feeds your hand, a Militia slows your rival down, a Chapel trims the junk out of your deck before it clogs it. By the final turns you hope your deck is a machine, spitting out enough Gold to grab Provinces, the big Victory Point cards. The catch is that Victory cards clog your deck too, so the endgame is a race to buy points before your engine chokes on them. Easy to learn, genuinely hard to master.

Each match uses ten kingdom card stacks, and with 500+ cards and 16+ expansions the possible combinations run into the hundreds of septillions. Every tableau plays differently: one game is about chaining actions, the next about attacking your opponent's hand or racing for cheap points. Expansions like Plunder add new card types and rules on top, and you can customize a kingdom, save it and share it with friends.

The solitaire mode is a proper opponent, not a punching bag. Four difficulty levels, with an AI that learned the game through self-play, and it moves fast: no shuffling, no counting, just your turn and its turn. It suits short sessions well; one player reports five to eight games in an hour. The hard AI plays a mean game, so expect to lose while you learn which cards to prioritize and when to buy attacks.

Up to six players can share one game, online or in person. Set up a private table for a family match, invite a friend, or pass a single device around the living room in Pass and Play. Asynchronous mode lets a match stretch over a day or two, one turn at a time, which suits busy schedules. And since only the host needs the expansions, one person's collection is enough for the whole table.