Dominion: Hinterlands Card Game Review

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Not content with your current Dominion, you have now set your sights on lands that are far, far away in Dominion: Hinterlands. Get in touch with foreign leaders and set up embassies in their lands. Deal with traders and establish lucrative trade routes between your kingdoms. Carry out a scheme or two to make sure things go your way. Take control of key assets and expand your domain in this expansion for the hit Dominion card game.

Dominion: Hinterlands is the 6th expansion for Dominion, arguably the most popular non-collectible strategy card game out there at the moment. This is an expansion set, and you will need to already own either the base Dominion game or a standalone expansion such as Intrigue in order to play it. This review details the new cards and mechanics that are introduced with Hinterlands. Therefore, if you want to find out more about the basic gameplay, please read our Dominion review.

As the name suggests, the theme of Hinterlands is focused on the outskirts of your Dominion and your interaction with your neighbors. The cards generally include peripheral countryside developments. There are also cards that represent foreign leaders and your attempts to deal with them. And lets not forget the many developments required to set up lucrative trade routes between your kingdoms to earn that all-important coin.

There are cards like the Border Village and Duchess that represent the outer holdings of your kingdom, and cards such as the Embassy and Mandarin that represent the interactions with your neighbors. There are also the trade- and communication-related cards such as the Crossroads, Silk Road and Trader. And no medieval countryside is complete without the presence of a couple of Noble Brigands and some Ill-Gotten Gains.

In terms of gameplay mechanics, Hinterlands does not introduce radically new concepts, but rather expands on a few existing mechanics to make the game more solid and enjoyable. One of the focuses is on cards that trigger an effect when you gain them. An example is the Cache, which acts just like a Gold card, but costing only 5 coins. However, you also gain 2 Coppers when you gain this card, effectively diluting your deck. This is interesting, allowing strong cards to be available for a lower cost, but with negative side effects. The opposite can also occur, such as in the case of Border Village, an expensive card with a weak ability. However, you can gain another card when you gain the Border Village.

Another mechanic that this expansion focuses on is the ability to trash cards from your hand. Cards such as the Jack of all Trades, the Spice Merchant and the Trader let you trash cards (with different conditions and limitations) as part of their abilities. What this does is let the skillful player strategically thin their deck, discarding cards that are inefficient (such as the Estates and Coppers from your starting hand), or other cards that are no longer useful in the late game.

Hinterlands also includes many cheap 2-cost and 3-cost cards that have quite interesting abilities. There’s the 2-cost Crossroads that can potentially gain you 3 extra actions and a couple of cards to boot! These cards make the early game more interesting, letting you do more fun stuff than simply buying Silvers and finishing your turn. In fact, almost all the cards in this set have fairly complex effects, rather than the boring “+1 card, +1 action” abilities of the older cards.

There are also a few standout cards that challenge traditional deck-building strategies. The previously-mentioned Crossroads is one, letting you draw cards depending on how many victory cards you have in your hand. There is also the Trader that lets you trash a card and gain lots of Silvers, and even lets you replace whatever card you gain with a Silver. And then there’s the 2-cost Fool’s Gold which is only worth 1 coin if you have only one in your hand; but each subsequent Fool’s Gold in your hand is worth a whopping 4 coins! These cards will force you to change your strategy, and some of them even require you to design your deck around them.

Dominion: Hinterlands does not add brand new concepts to the fast-growing stable of Dominion cards. What it does though, is flesh out some of the more complex and interactive mechanics introduced in previous sets. It also adds more complicated and interesting card effects, and serves to nicely round out the game for players who have had a fair few Dominion games under their belt. Do remember that you need either the base game or a standalone expansion such as Intrigue to venture into these lands far, far away!

Complexity: 3.0/5.0

Playing Time: 45 minutes

Number of Players: 2 to 4 players (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion)

See the Dominion: Hinterlands Spoiler Card List

Check out the other games in this series!

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