Rio Grande Games Dominion: Renaissance

great additon the the main game! Fun cards that can mix with other king cards.

This review is for the Renaissance expansion, as the Renaissance was listed together with the Second Edition base Dominion set. Dominion: Renaissance is great. It balances adding some clever mechanics that promote interesting and varied strategies while still remaining very approachable and fun to play. It will be equally fun for both high-level and casual play. Renaissance is quite possibly the best expansion created yet. Its easy enough to be a first expansion as well. If you have any interest in Dominion and are looking for more, I can wholeheartedly recommend this one (even over Prosperity and Seaside). I have a personal love for Adventures, Empires and even most aspects of Nocturne, but they are slightly more complex (especially Nocturne). The mechanics: The coin and action saving tokens (collected on your Coffers and Villagers mats, respectively) are great to use. Coffers return from the Guilds expansion. Having the ability to smooth out your purchasing power across turns or even save up for a big turn is very powerful and strategic. The Villagers can really get you out of a bind when you draw actions you couldnt otherwise play. They even allow you to use more cards that dont give +Action in your deck than you otherwise would. The provided cards also dole them out in interesting ways. The Artifacts are passive ability-granting cards that you hold on to that stay out of your deck. There is only one copy of each and players fulfilling certain conditions on the corresponding Kingdom card can take it away for themselves. Flag Bearer in particular seems to get stolen a lot, as the person holding it basically gets a 6 card hand instead of 5. They are fun and provide a interesting form of player interaction aside from Attack cards, though there are only 4 Kingdom cards that use Artifacts. This expansion is light on attack cards: there are only 2, which isnt really a problem due to the Artifacts. The Projects provide an extra ability for the rest of the game after you buy them, and are often very useful. Sometimes it comes down to when you should buy them, not if. Some are very fun, such as Citadel, thats like an automatic Throne Room at the start of each turn. There are 20 in total and youll want to include 1 or 2 in every game you play, whether or not you use the other Renaissance cards in a given game. There are also a fair number of Kingdom cards that dont use any of the new mechanics. Some use parts of mechanics from prior sets (e.g. Duration cards from Seaside, when-trash abilities from Dark Ages, and when-gain abilities from Hinterlands, cost reduction from Intrigue, etc.). These are also well put together and interesting without being overly complex. Even the most complex cards, (possibly Improve, Research and the Capitalism Project) arent that hard to understand. The components: The only slight issue is here are some slight printing coloration issues where the tint of the card fronts doesnt always match that of prior expansions - they are generally lighter. The backs are ever so slightly different as well, but not enough to notice unless youre looking. It hasnt been an issue in my play group yet. The other components (mats, tokens, and wooden project tracking cubes) are high quality and look nice.