Dominion: How It Plays, 2nd Edition Changes, and Who It's For

Each player starts with a deck of 3 Estates and 7 Coppers, shuffled face down. From that deck, each player draws an initial hand of 5 cards.

Use 8 copies each of Estate, Duchy, and Province in a 2-player game, and 12 copies of each in a game with 3-4 players.

The rulebook recommends a specific first-game set of ten: Cellar, Market, Merchant, Militia, Mine, Moat, Remodel, Smithy, Village, and Workshop.

You can pick Kingdom cards randomly by shuffling the randomizer cards — the ones with blue-framed backs — and turning over 10 of them. Randomizer cards are not playing cards and must not be mixed with them; do not put the randomizer card into the Supply pile itself.

Each Kingdom card pile gets 10 copies of the card. The exception is Victory Kingdom cards like Gardens, which follow the Victory card rule: 8 copies for 2 players and 12 copies for 3-4 players.

The starting player is chosen randomly. If you just played a game that wasn't a tie, the winner of the previous game goes last and the player to their left goes first.

Each player draws an initial hand of 5 cards from their shuffled starting deck before the game begins.

Yes. You may play an Action card even knowing you won't be able to fully carry out its instructions; you simply do as much of it as you can. This means you never have to hold back a card just because part of its effect would be wasted.

No. Playing Actions is entirely optional — you can stop whenever you like, even with a playable Action card still in your hand and Actions remaining. There is no penalty for leaving Actions unused.

The extra Action is added immediately when the card resolves, but you must completely finish the current Action card before playing the next one. A card giving +2 Actions lets you play two more Action cards that turn.

You can play any number of Treasure cards from your hand, in any order you choose. Each Treasure played goes to your in-play area and produces its coins for the turn.

Gaining a card means moving it from the Supply directly to your discard pile — not to your hand or deck. You won't see the card until you shuffle your discard pile into a new deck and draw it.

The game ends after three Supply piles are empty or after the Province pile is empty. Once that happens, players count up the victory points on all of their cards, and the player with the most points wins.

You count up the victory points on all of your cards when the game ends. Your whole deck is your Dominion — it contains your victory points along with your resources and actions — and the player with the most points wins.

The rules acknowledge that games can end in a tie — the guideline for choosing the starting player of the next game only applies when the previous game was not a tie. Beyond that, the rulebook provides no tiebreaker procedure.

No. Buying a card only spends the coins you have available that turn; the Treasure cards themselves stay with you. Treasures produce income every time you draw them, so they can be spent again on future turns.

The blue-bordered cards are Randomizer cards, one per Kingdom card, used only to randomly choose which 10 Kingdom cards to play with. They are not playing cards and must never be mixed in with the tan-bordered playing cards or placed in Supply piles.