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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009Well, I tried to post a review of Seaside in the forums, and I got a big, fat error. Maybe that’s why no one is writing anything there? I’ll try to get it fixed and post tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s the review:
Dominion won game of the year in 2009, and Dominion: Seaside is the newest installment in this wonderful strategy card game. The basic premise of Dominion remains the same: buy actions, money, and victory points to help you win the game. Seaside adds a couple of new elements: duration cards and play mats.
One of our regular players is fond of saying that Dominion is as easy as A, B, C: Action, Buy, Clean-up. Duration is the new D. These new orange cards are played like regular action cards but have a lingering effect that follows through to your next turn. For example, the Caravan card lets you get +1 Card and +1 Action. At the beginning of your next turn, you get +1 card. These cards remain on the playing field until all of their effects take place, at which point they are shuffled into your deck as usual (in other words, they are not cleaned up in the turn on which you played them, but on your next turn’s clean-up instead). 8 of these duration cards grace the Seaside expansion, and all have varying effects on the game. If you’re used to playing with minimal decks and lots of money, these cards in the hands of your opponents can easily lose you the game.
There are also 3 play mats per player: the Pirate Ship, the Native Village, and the Island. Each of these only come into play when/if a player buys a specific action card.
The Pirate Ship mat is attached to a card called, strangely enough, Pirate Ship. It’s both an attack and a source of money. Specifically, you choose either to force opponents to discard their money, gaining you a pirate coin to place on your ship mat, or to use your ill-gotten gains, giving you +1 money per pirate coin on your ship. (As an aside here, the pirate coins are delightful: made of metal with great heft and a ton of fun to play with.)
The Island mat is attached to a card called…wait for it…Island. This is a victory point card worth 2 that requires you to set it aside on your island mat along with another card in your hand. I never buy the Island unless I have another victory point card in my hand. All of the set-aside cards only come back into play at the end of the game, so it’s a great way to declutter your deck and buy a ton of points. Every Island game I’ve played so far has been unusually high-scoring.
Finally, the Native Village mat is attached to a card called (do I even need to say it?) Native Village. This card allows you to have +2 actions and then choose to either set aside the top card of your deck face down on the village mat (without looking at it first, cheater!) or put all of the cards in the village into your hand. After cards are placed on the mat you may look at them any time. It’s an interesting card, but less useful than the other two unless you have a surfeit of Sea Hags (each other player discards the top card of his deck, then gains a Curse card, putting it on top of his deck) in the game.
The last card/component I want to mention is the Embargo card. Costing 2, the Embargo gives you +2 money for that turn and then you trash Embargo and place an embargo token on any supply pile. When a player buys a card with 1 or more embargo tokens on it, he must also take 1 curse card for each embargo token on the pile. We’ve had games where it wasn’t worth purchasing Provinces because there are 3 or more embargo tokens on the pile. Games with both the Sea Hag and the Embargo are fuuuuunny. You start any game of Dominion with 3 points, and we’ve had people end the game with fewer than 3 due to the overwhelming number of Curses in play. The embargo tokens are just as wonderful as the pirate coins; fully metal and fun to play with.
Conclusions:
I love Seaside!!! The game is a ton of fun to play all by its lonesome, unlike Intrigue, which is a pain to play alone. The cards are well thought-out and add a new dimension to the game, forcing people to rethink their tried-and-true strategies. The only downside is that you must have either Dominion or Dominion: Intrigue since Seaside doesn’t come with money, victory points, or curses. But, hey, you all have Dominion anyway, right? If not, you should. It’s an amazing game and totally worthy of game of the year.
