Dominations: Road to Civilization

Expand your tribe’s knowledge in order to build cities and monuments, and develop your skills in different domains on your way to become a mighty nation!

2-4 players
80-120 minutes
Designers: Eric Dubus & Olivier Melison
Artists: Loïc Muzy, Agathe Pitié, Amber Scharf & Florian Stitz

Publisher: Holy Grail Games
https://holygrail.games/

Dominations is played over the course of 3 ages, in which each player takes 5 turns. On your turn, you’ll go through these 3 phases:
1- Place one of your land tiles and gain knowledge based on the colours that get connected, and additionally for matching colours and the camp on the tile itself. Cities on adjacent tiles get triggered, obtaining knowledge for their owners.
2- Build or upgrade a city on a tile by paying knowledge that matches the colour of the camp, or contribute to a monument and receive its current level card to place in your civilization tree.
3- Pay knowledge to acquire a new mastery card, giving you special abilities or benefits for the remainder of the game. This part comes with an extra mini-puzzle, as you’ll have to make sure to match the colours on the edges of these mastery cards in your civilization tree!

At the end of each age, players resolve the end of age effects on cards in their civilization tree and gain points based on their influence. The player with the most knowledge in each domain gains a domination card, earning them points, but also giving them a benefit. Players draw new tiles, reset all of their knowledge tracks to zero and start a new age.
After the third and final age, players receive additional points for their objective cards, and the player with the most points wins the game!

Dominations is quite a crunchy eurogame, with a clever use of triangle domino tiles to determine which and how much influence you’ll gain at the start of your turn.
On our first play, we often found ourselves overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities, not only when placing tiles, but also where to build your cities and which mastery cards to pick. Sounds like quite an investment? This game definitely comes with a steep learning curve, but for me it’s been absolutely worth it and I really love how I keep discovering possible strategies each time we play!