After playing several tile based games such as "Carcassonne", "Java", and ye ol' faithful "Seafarers of Catan" over the past months, I was more than looking forward to sitting down and playing Domaine. Like "Castle" you are provided with a gaming area frame to keep the tiles from being knocked. This frame also provides a scoring track and card areas making the whole game tight and compact, perfect for playing in the caravan or tent.

Further more the tiles you lay in the centre (bar the "Royal City" tile which goes in the middle) are placed wherever you chose in whatever rotation you chose, making every game different.

So we now have a very decorative frame surrounding our 9 playing tiles, all well and good, now for the pieces. I've often said that i prefer wooden pieces to plastic, however for this game i find the highly detailed knights on horse-back and the castle a delight.

So, yes i like this games components quite a lot. So what is this game all about? Its a sneaky, back-stabbing, brutal game....right up my street :p Its all about land ownership, and the fight to defend whats yours whilst trying to steal land of the players bordering your Domaines.

As usual with german games you have some tough choices to make throughout the game, for example, do i pay three ducats and extend the border around that other domaine of mine...or sell a card so that i can play this other card next turn and steal Brians only diamond mine :)

During your turn you have a hand consisting of three cards. You then have two choices, either sell a card to make some money or pay to play a card. These cards all cost you money to play and allow you to add borders to create Domaines, expand existing domaines into bordering ones and move in more knights to your domaine (as knights equal power, and therefore your oponents pathetic one knight is unable to stop your horde of knights from claiming more land for themselves.) In addition there are two very powerful (and costly) cards that allow you to make an oponents knight desert and join your ranks and even more subtle, the Alliance card, stopping your opponents hoards from stealing your hard earned lands :)

With careful forethought and a bit of luck your domaines will grow and encompass almost the whole island leaving your opponent with only the bits you neither want nor need. And if your lucky, one card can carve up your opponents domain into nothing.(Losing him lots of points, and that iritating smirk hes had for the last 6 turns!) Oh the frustration when Brian realised that in one move i had cut him off from all his forests losing him around ten valuable points AND secured myself his gold mine earning myself an aditional five points for completing a set of three mines! That's because, in this game, as you gain territory, your opponents lose points and you gain the points, even to the point where taking one of a set of 3 mines costs your opponent a precious 5 points for losing the set!

SUMMARY:
Some days you just dont want to play a cutesie trading game, some days you want to thwart your opponents every move, some days you want to be the nastiest player at the table and bathe in the hatred of your fellow gamers.....some days you want to play DOMAINE!! :o)

Review by Tom