Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Dominion: Prosperity

Game: Dominion: Prosperity

Manufacturer: Rio Grande

Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino

Year: 2010

Dominion is one of the most played games in our collection. It was one of our first games and our entry point into the deck-building genre. We still love playing it to this day and have expanded it with both the Prosperity and Seaside expansions. I can’t deny that one of the reasons it hits the table so often is because the Yellow Meeple can beat Amy at deck-builders and to be honest it’s really rare for me to win games in our household!! This week we’re taking at Prosperity which we play with almost every time we play Dominion.

Prosperity turns Dominion into a big money game. It adds Platinum cards, worth 5 gold and costing 9 to purchase and Colony cards which cost 11 gold to purchase and are worth 10 victory points each. If you’re only playing with Prosperity then these are always in the game and the guidance is that otherwise they should be used at random eg. if you’re playing with 5 base game cards and 5 Prosperity cards then shuffle one of each together, draw one card and if it’s from the Prosperity set then you play with the big money and victory point cards.

The full selection of cards in Dominion:Prosperity

The expansion also introduces some new types of cards. The first is Action-Treasure where the card is often worth some money and includes a bonus action such as taking an additional gold card when you buy any victory card. The Contraband card is also unique in that it gives your opponent the opportunity to ban you from buying a specific named card in your turn. This could be especially useful when there is one province or Colony card remaining which would trigger the end of the game if bought!

Certain cards also gain you victory points as well as actions, for example, the Bishop allows you to trash a card from your hand and gain victory point tokens worth half its cost.

The Goons, Monument and Bishop cards all potentially earn you victory point tokens which add to your victory point total at the end of the game.

The final new and unique twist in this expansion is the Trade Route. A Trade Route card and a gold coin is added when the first of each victory point cards is bought (so the card can contain 4 coins in total if Colony cards are played with). Then when a player plays the Trade Route card as an action they get additional monies equal to the number of coins on the Trade Route card.

For me the fun of Prosperity is in the fact that you can have some huge turns where you feel like you’re achieving loads of things. It’s a bit weird really since it’s only ‘big money’ compared to the base game and if I’d never played the base game, I suppose I wouldn’t really notice this aspect. The extra card types are also cool, but really I just love the big victory point wins.

I will rarely play Dominion without some Prosperity cards thrown in, which is really a glowing review and I’d give it an 8.5/10.