I don't care about you

When the boardgame Dominion first came out I loved it and played a ton.  It is a deckbuilding game where you start out the game with a deck of terrible cards and buy things to make your deck better and score points.  Eventually though I ran into the problem that Dominion was all about strategy and had pretty trivial tactical decisions.  Figuring out whether or not I was going for a big deck Gardens strategy or a lean Chapel - Silver - Gold type strategy was interesting but on each turn my decision was usually trivial.  In addition to trivial decisions on most turns there was also the issue that I really didn't care what my opponent did most of the time - we could easily have just played in separate rooms and shouted when we bought a fourth Province.  I understand that Dominion expansions have improved this situation somewhat but they haven't done so enough to make me really interested in the game again.

The fundamental problem to my mind is that the options that exist for purchases are always the same turn after turn.  Your turn most of the time can be simply summed up by how many gold pieces your hand is worth and then you buy the thing that you knew you were going to buy with that many gold.  It turns out that I do like strategy discussions but I don't like sitting around shuffling cards watching other people count while waiting to see how my strategy plays out.

I have recently been playing some Ascension and I think it really managed to do the whole deckbuilding thing much better.  The two critical differences are that instead of a huge list of things to buy there are six things from a deck of random stuff.  You can have a strategy but since every thing that is bought ends up being immediately replaced by something random you have to adapt on each turn.  You can decide that you really want to run a Mechana Construct strategy but when there aren't any Mechana cards you still have to make choices.

The second thing that changes everything is that currency is split into two types.  Defining your hand by two numbers instead of one may not seem like a huge difference but it really does offer a huge range of different choices when combined with the cards that may be available.  Also because cards you buy are replaced immediately there can be a lot of thought put into deciding which currency you use first.  Combine that with the various cards effects that can cause you to discard or make choices on which resources to gain and the decision tree for any given turn often becomes extremely complex.

The big thing that I like better about Ascension is that I really do care what my opponent does.  I need to read all of the cards and compare their effects on my board position as well as my opponent's.  Sometimes I need to draft defensively, sometimes not, but paying attention to what my opponents do is important and their choices really do affect my play.  The simple summary of the situation for me is that Dominion is a lot more about shuffling and Ascension is a lot more about thinking so Ascension has a lot more appeal.  If I had a robot shuffling for me and Dominion turns only took 2-3 seconds then my mind might change but I don't see that happening at my dinner table anytime soon.