[1][2] In Dominion, each player takes turns repeatedly drawing through their own personal deck of cards.

Players ultimately seek to build the strongest deck with the most victory points needed to win the game.

The game has a medieval theme with card names referencing pre-industrial, monarchical, and feudal social structures.

[6] In a game of Dominion, two to four players compete to gather the most victory points by strategically building a deck of cards.

To begin a game, players decide on the kingdom cards they are going to use, either selecting them or choosing randomly, and setting out the supply.

Usually, the game's main strategy is to build a deck that maximizes the player's ability to draw hands that can buy Provinces.

These have different effects on the game; for example, the Adventures expansion introduced the ability to buy Events, which provide immediate bonuses.

[10][11] Many reviews recommend buying expansions to increase the variety of the game, as cards from different sets may be freely mixed with each other.

[3] In 2006, Vaccarino invented the deck-building mechanic while working on a fantasy adventure card game called "Spirit Warriors II".

[34] As more expansions were released, Vaccarino added new rules to prevent undesirable game situations and permit new mechanics.

[37] Second-edition versions of the Seaside, Prosperity, Hinterlands, Cornucopia, and Guilds expansions, similarly phasing out some old cards and introducing new ones, were released in 2022 and 2024.

[13] Vaccarino originally planned to stop expanding the game after Guilds, though he conceded:[29] "Still, it’s likely that at some point the publishers will want another expansion and, well, I like to be friendly.

The first contained Dominion First Edition, Alchemy, Prosperity, and the promotional cards Envoy and Black Market.

[53] One of these unofficial implementations, however, located at dominion.isotropic.org, was used by Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino and his playtesters during the development of new cards, even long after the site was closed to the public.

[54] A licensed browser-based online implementation of Dominion, hosted by Goko, went live in early March 2013.

[55] The official app provided the base Dominion game free to play, and cards from the expansions available for a fee.

They were dissatisfied with all prior online implementations of Dominion and proposed their new approach to Vaccarino, who was impressed with what the two developers were able to do and gave them the license.

[59] Temple Gates Games released a licensed version of Dominion for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android devices in early access in October 2021.

In addition, it and the expansions have sold more than 2.5 million copies[6] and been translated into 18 languages: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, bokmål Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

[1][13] The Spiel des Jahres, a highly prestigious prize, is primarily intended for family games, and the winner is generally purchased in large volume within Germany for that purpose.