It is a fun experience to see your lowly, weak deck at the beginning of a game build up to a behemoth to conquer everything by the time the game ends. Deck builders usually end up being engine building games, which is among the most common and popular mechanics in board gaming. There is a long history there which we won’t get into, but the end result is bad for players who want the Dominion experience on mobile.Ī lot of reasons, of course. It is ripe for mobile and in-app purchases. Now that we’ve brought everybody up to speed on Dominion, let’s rant at the inability to get a decent mobile implementation for that game. All of the games mentioned below which involve drawing hands allow you the opportunity to play all of the cards in your hand each turn.

Cards can be played to allow more actions, but you, generally, can’t play all action cards from your hand. One rule which most deck builders don’t follow from Dominion is that Dominion allows you to play only one action card per turn. You would be amazed at how many deck builders hit on each of those eight points. Deck builders are required to have a near endless supply of expansions.Being an engine builder, there is usually a point in the game where a player must shift from deck-improvement to goal-chasing.The deck building doubles as an engine building exercise, leading to some very powerful decks at the end of a game.Card abilities to allow you to extend turns with extra card draws.The ability to get rid of cards from your deck to make it stronger and/or more cohesive (called “trashing”).These cards are more powerful than your starting cards and vary in cost and strength and are, usually, purchased into your discard pile. There is a common pool of cards available for each player to purchase.The discard pile is shuffled when the draw pile is empty. Decks are shuffled and a starting hand is drawn (almost always five cards).Starting hands of a set number of cards (frequently 10), containing a predefined number of cards which either help you purchase new cards or help you towards the ultimate game goal (which can be scoring points, defeating an opponent, etc…).Many people instantly associate deck builders with Dominion, so this is as good of place as any to start. Some very basic mechanics found in Dominion have been repeated many times over. Dominion set the groundwork of what we will call a “classic” deck builder.

Online card deck builder