EMINENT DOMAIN
GAME DESCRIPTION
Designed by Seth Jaffee
Published by Arclight and Tasty Minstrel Games in 2011,
still in print
COMPONENTS, PACKAGING
& PRESENTATION (20% of overall rating)
Eminent domain is primarily a deck-building card game, and
as such the cards take center stage here.
There are five decks of cards used in the game: the Action/Role cards
that make up the majority of a player’s deck, Planet cards that the player
acquires over the span of the game and places in his tableau in front of him,
and three Technology decks that players may purchase cards from to add to their
decks or, less frequently, their tableau in front of them. The cards are all beautiful to look at and
extremely functional. However, the
quality of the cards leaves something to be desired. They are very thin and prone to creasing, and
after a few plays some of my cards already had obvious signs of wear at the
corners. When opening my copy of the
game for the first time, two of my cards were irreparably creased merely by my
attempt to get the cards out of the shrink-wrap they came in. TMG was gracious enough to send me a
replacement for one of the cards free of charge (I hadn’t noticed I had two
creased cards when I emailed them for the replacement for the first one), but I
wish I hadn’t needed to take that step in the first place. Also, I am not much of a fan of sleeving
cards, especially in deckbuilding games where constant shuffling is the norm,
and so the wearing edges of the cards are a serious problem for me.
On to the rest of the components, though. There is a central board that most of the
Action/Role cards are placed on at the beginning of the game, and it is well
designed and of excellent quality. I
suspect that if you decide to sleeve your cards, they might not stack well on
this board, although I have not done so myself… this is just a suspicion. The box that the game comes in is very good
quality, although the insert included is unnecessary and almost totally useless
(I threw mine out almost immediately).
Once you get rid of the insert, the game fits easily back into the box,
and there’s enough extra room that “baggie junkies” (of which I am occasionally
accused of being) will have lots of room to nerd out their copies to their
hearts’ content.
The game also comes with a number of plastic ships, which
are essentially a form of currency and are massive overkill. They could’ve just as easily been die-cut
counters and been just as functional, but there’s no denying how neat they look
when you have a bunch of them sitting in front of you. They’re of three different sizes, which I
understand comes from repurposing an older mold, and they look really cool,
although they’re a bit hard to pick up at times. There are also some die-cut victory point
tokens that are functional (think Race For The Galaxy here), some very high
quality painted wooden disks to represent the goods planets may produce,
die-cut starting planet cards and player reference cards (I’ll get back to
these in a minute). All of these other components are of very high quality.
The graphic design of the game overall is superb. The game is easy on the eyes, and although
the typeface on some of the cards could be a bit bigger, the cards have so
little variation in general that it’s a non-issue. The rulebook is well produced, of good paper
quality and easy to read.
Overall, the component quality is decent, but unless you’re
a card sleeving maniac, you’re going to get frustrated with the quality of the cards
after a few plays. I wish the publishers
had spent a little more money on the cards and a bit less on plastic
ships. It’s unfortunate that the low
card quality offsets the overall wonderful look of this game.
COMPONENTS, PACKAGING
& PRESENTATION: 5.0/10
RULES &
PLAYABILITY (30% of overall rating)
Once you crack the rulebook, most of the game starts to make
sense immediately. The rules are very
well written and easy to understand, and the mechanics all work together
seamlessly. This is a well designed game
that plays smoothly and requires very little reference to the rulebook once the
first few turns have been played. I love
game designs that have few mechanics to remember but lots of player options and
this is one of them. The player aids are
a brief moment of sheer brilliance: not only do you have all the information
you need to play the game on them, but they serve as an unobtrusive method of
determining the start player of the game.
How this has not been thought of before is beyond me, but I hope it’s
used in other game designs in the future.
The iconography on the cards is very good, although there
are a couple of game concepts that are occasionally difficult for new players
to grasp. For example, “+1 colony”
usually means placing the card underneath a specific planet, but because that particular
mechanic appears nowhere else in the game, it can be tough for new players to
remember exactly what that means.
The game has a reasonably low learning curve. There are really only two or three concepts
that a player has to wrap his brain around before he’s off and running, and it
usually only takes a few minutes to make sure that happens. Learning the game straight out of the box is
relatively easy, and so it’s an accessible game for new players.
RULES &
PLAYABILITY: 8.0/10
GAME EXPERIENCE (40%
of overall rating)
This game is an absolute joy to play. It moves extremely quickly with almost no
downtime… sometimes it moves almost too quickly. In the games I’ve played, it’s not uncommon
for a player to finish his turn, the next player to start his, and the previous
guy is still trying to figure out what he’s doing in response to the last one.
There is very little potential for analysis paralysis in
this game. Usually the hand of cards you’ve
got will indicate which action and role you will be taking on any given
turn. This does not mean, however, that
the game is devoid of meaningful choices.
On the contrary, how your deck is built over the span of the game is half
the game itself. Unlike many other
deckbuilders I’ve played, customizing and streamlining your deck to the
particular strategy you’re pursuing is a basic tactic rather than an afterthought,
which means each turn you’re building your engine toward future turns in a very
efficient way. This makes the play of
the game very rewarding: you get to see your engine ticking along (or
sputtering, if you’ve failed), and you just know you actually accomplished
something, win or lose.
If there’s one flaw in Eminent Domain’s play experience, it’s
that there is very little social interaction in this game. That’s not to say this is a “multiplayer
solitaire” game… one of the key strategies of the game is watching what the
other players are doing so you can piggyback on their deck strategies at
crucial moments. Just blindly following
a tried and true deck concept might work, but it won’t work as well as an alert
player’s deck that can capitalize on the opportunities given by the other
players around the table. It does create
a rather quiet gaming experience though, which some folks might find a bit off-putting.
As much as I like this game, I do have to admit that there
seems to be very little originality in the design. It works well, but anyone who’s ever played
Glory To Rome or Race For The Galaxy is going to recognize some mechanics that
have been lifted directly from those games and plopped into this one. While that’s going to turn off some people,
to me it seems more like a refinement of those mechanics into a
better-functioning game overall. This
game just works.
GAME EXPERIENCE:
8.5/10
REPLAY/OWNERSHIP
VALUE (10% of overall rating)
The first time I played Eminent Domain, I got my butt handed
to me. Instead of turning me off to the
game, I immediately wanted to play again… and again, and again. This game has an addictive quality to it:
each game you see something else that looks like it might work, and you
instantly want to give it a go and see if you’re right. Because the game moves so quickly, and
because there are many different options to pursue each game, this one’s got a
ton of replayability. It’s too bad the
cards will look so worn after a few plays, and that definitely hurts the game
in the “bang for the buck category”… but hey, maybe you can try to think of
that like some people think of dog-eared pages of a well-loved book. If you don’t mind sleeving cards, you’ll be
fine.
The game definitely has a few good strategies that will
become easily apparent once you’ve played a few times, but because there can be
so much variation in what the other players are doing, the game doesn’t feel
solvable. It scales well with two, three
or four players, and so I see this being a game you won’t have a hard time
getting to the table.
REPLAY/OWNERSHIP
VALUE: 9.0/10
OVERALL RATING:
76/100
FINAL THOUGHTS
I really like this game.
It feels like the next step in the evolution of the deckbuilding genre
of games, has a ton of depth, looks nice on the table, plays fast enough that
it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and is satisfying once the game is over. I just wish the component quality was
better. Making a deckbuilder with
low-quality cards is a bad idea, no matter how smooth the game design is, and
you shouldn’t expect players to sleeve cards.
Overall, though, this game replaces Race For The Galaxy and Glory To
Rome for me… it’s that good.
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