Poke-dominion the card game

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sun Nov 22, 2015 9:15 am

So Dominion is a deck building game and that's all I know about it but it seems like that "players build from a shared resource" playstyle would fit a "Catch Pokemon in the wild and train them" kind of deck building pokemon card game.

Would Dominion be a good fit, or are there other games better suited for this.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sun Nov 22, 2015 1:02 pm

You probably want to go closer to Ascension or Legendary, the two-resource variants. You use Catch cards to buy Pokemon cards, then play those Pokemon cards to buy Gym Badge cards.

K · Post by K » Sun Nov 22, 2015 6:44 pm

Star Realms is probably the best game with a mechanic of this type.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Nov 23, 2015 6:24 am

Dominion is to deckbuilders what D&D is to ttrpgs. It came along first and has the most recognition and largest number of players, no two play groups use the exact same set of expansions when playing the game, and for designing new games you are better off picking something else as your starting point.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Nov 23, 2015 7:10 pm

K wrote:Star Realms is probably the best game with a mechanic of this type.

This. Star realms is the best possible version of this and is an incredible game. Games are short, tactically interesting, and different every time. It seems highly mappable to a pokemon theme.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Nov 23, 2015 8:24 pm

Star Realms is quite possibly the best introductory deckbuilder out there, but I'm not entirely sure if I'd use it for a Pokemon theme or if I'd want to go with something a bit more complex:

Pokemon generally have three areas:

Capturing - this does map very nicely to something like Star Realms's Trade Row, where which Pokemons are available changes throughout the game.

Tactical one on one poke-battles. This would take some effort, but could possibly be mapped onto something close to Star Realms's bases and outposts setup. You would have an active pokemon in a single "outpost" slot, and they would stay until swapped out or defeated by your opponent's Active Pokemon. You would then have other Pokemon on your team waiting in non-outpost base slots, where they can take damage that gets past your Active pokemon. Of course, with the Star Realms model, there would have to be an allowance for Pokemon to damage opposing trainers in some way - which doesn't really reflect the source material. So maybe handle that as forced discard or something rather than as hit point ("Authority") damage.

Training and coaching of Pokemon. If you're going with Star Realms, this has to be mapped onto the non-persistent ships cards. So you would play cards that would give your Active or Team-in-Reserve Pokemon bonuses for a single turn or allow use of particular moves for that turn.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Nov 23, 2015 8:35 pm

It seems like if the deck you're trying to build is Pokemon, then you basically go with a "Gotta Catch Them All" win condition, and stick to the original 150, or just a "whoever has the most when [condition is met] wins" and throw in whichever pokemon you feel like. Either option in "Literally try to catch everything, but you can't have Sableye" or "You can have Sableye, but you're just trying to catch more than anyone else" is less than satisfying to me, so what about making the major goal be Gym Badges?

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Tue Nov 24, 2015 5:02 pm

Gym Badges as victory points sounds like a more satisfying game than just the standard points race. Also, you can then put in mechanics that encourage players to release pokemon rather than letting them keep track of 151 tokens. (If having a hundred pokemon is a good strategy, everyone will do it and the game sucks. If it's a bad strategy, then only newbies will do it, and they'll get frustrated and quit playing.)