Dominion: Seaside

Dominion Seaside is an expansion of Dominion, which means you need the base cards from one of the stand alone games.  Or you can get a set of just the base cards.  Apparently that's a thing now.  We scavenged the base cards from Intrigue.

We had two players for our maiden voyage.  (Get it?  Because it's nautically themed!)  One of the things I like about Dominion games is the suggested sets for a well rounded game.  This is super helpful when you're not familiar with the cards of a new expansion.  We played the High Seas set.  There were a couple of cards with interesting mechanics.  The Pirate Ship was a little aggressive and allowed a player to either collect gold tokens or use the gold tokens she'd already acquired as money.  The Smuggler helped us build up our decks really fast.  The game changer, though, was Embargo.  This card let the player put an embargo on a stack of cards, which results in a player gaining a curse card whenever the player bought a card from that stack.  Put an embargo on the province cards, and all of a sudden your 8 coins buy effectively 5 victory points instead of 6.  Put an embargo on the duchy cards, and the victory points drop from 3 to 2.  

All set up and ready to go!  Oh wait, where are the curse cards?

We only had two embargos: one on provinces, one on duchies.  This was very effective to get people to stop buying duchies, but not so much with the provinces.  Embargoes can stack, causing a buyer to take two, three, four, or however many curse cards are required.  In a game with more people, the provinces could easily get embargoed to the point where a purchase is just not worth it anymore.

This was a really close game.  We both had the same number of province cards and estate cards (after canceling out curses), but I was behind by just one duchy!  Oh well, maybe next time...