Temple Gates & Rio Grande Announce
The Dominion App
Temple Gates Games, in collaboration with Rio Grande Games, announce the development of the Dominion app for PC and mobile platforms.
Dominion is a card game that invented the deckbuilding genre. Since winning Spiel des Jahres in 2008, it has established itself as a true classic. It’s sold millions of copies around the world. For many, Dominion was the game that introduced them to modern, Euro-style boardgaming. Its core loop is easy to pick up, but offers a wealth of strategy to explore. As content has continued to be developed, such as 2020’s Menagerie expansion, the Dominion community has grown. Players have awaited a mobile and PC version of the game, a wish that will soon be granted!
Temple Gates Games is bringing Dominion to iOS, Android and Steam. The app is a true adaptation of the boardgame, offering players the deckbuilding card play they love in a digital form. There are a few perks to this app that make playing digitally a snap:
- Automated scorekeeping, setup & rules enforcement
- Jumbo mode for larger text
- Turbo mode to zoom through games quickly
- Neural net AI for solo play
- Async and real-time multiplayer
- Pass and play
- Cross platform compatible: Start on your phone, finish on your PC
Dominion will launch as a free to play title. Players can play with the ‘Base’ set of cards including 26 unique Kingdom cards, three basic Victory sets, and three basic Treasure sets. All expansions will be available for purchase at launch for five to ten USD dollars each.
This is a game of building a deck of cards. The deck contains your resources, victory points, and the things you can do. It starts out a small sad collection of Estates and Coppers, but you hope that by the end of the game it will be brimming with Gold, Provinces, and the inhabitants and structures of your kingdom.
Donald X. Vaccarino
Since its launch, Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino has created thirteen expansions to give players new challenges. Because each game uses only a subset of ten Kingdom cards, every game feels like a unique puzzle with its own flavor. With over five hundred cards across expansions, there are over sixty six sextillion possible unique games to play – meaning lots of replayability!
Dominion is the fifth digital board game release for Temple Gates Games, coming on the heels of Roll for the Galaxy. The studio began porting boardgames like Ascension to VR, and has since expanded to offer games across PC, console and mobile platforms. Temple Gates Games is known for including AI that learn in their boardgame apps using neural networks to master complex strategies.
The Dominion app will represent a new milestone for AI in gaming as the first commercial implementation of the techniques behind AlphaZero. Temple Gates built on the AI from Race for the Galaxy, but added a much deeper lookahead, which is important for Dominion’s emphasis on over-arching strategy. This deeper lookahead is only possible to compute by using a neural network to guide the growth of the search tree. By including an embedding layer for the first time to our neural network, our AI now learns the value of components of each card, rather than the cards themselves, meaning that it can master not just the 500+ cards in existence, but also cards which have yet to be designed.
Beta
The game is currently in beta. Supported platforms include Steam (PC), iOS, and Android. Sign up to join the action, slots are limited. This beta will open to a wider audience incrementally. The beta is free.
Digital Features
- 26 Unique card sets
- 1 – 4 player with network multiplayer
- Solo play against AI
- Thirteen expansions with over 500 cards available for purchase
- Pass and Play mode
- Tutorial & Rules
- Jumbo Mode for Accessibility