Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Dominion is the ancestor of all deck-building games, still a giant in the tabletop arena almost twenty years after it was released. Check out our review of the base game and our Dominion strategy guide!
Dominion also has plenty of expansions to explore, with the sixteenth released in 2024. In this series Meeple Mountain examines them all to determine which is the greatest. In each article we’ll introduce an expansion, put forward the motion that it deserves to be recognised as the greatest of all Dominion expansions, offer a rebuttal for why it isn’t the greatest and then deliver our verdict.
This time – Plunder
What does it add?
A lot, although not as much as at first blush. Plunder just seems like a lot, with 40 new Kingdom sets – more than any other expansion or even the base game. In terms of the new Kingdom sets, most of them are Durations, with many of those Treasures. A lot of the Durations wait until something specific happens before triggering (e.g. the next time you gain an Action card) rather than simply triggering on your next turn.
The new Loot cards are special Treasures that you can only gain via other cards (playing Kingdom cards or some of the new Landscape cards). There are 15 unique Loot cards with two copies of each and the majority are worth the same as a Gold and provide an additional effect.
Plunder includes two landscape types of cards. Events, which have been in every expansion since Adventures, and Traits. Events are special effects that you can pay for on your turn – they might give you a Loot, let you trash or discard a card, etc. Traits are new for Plunder and affect a single Kingdom pile, meaning when you buy, gain, play or discard that card, something else also happens.
Why is Plunder the Greatest?
Pirates. Plunder is all about pirates. With Kingdom cards such as Buried Treasure, Frigate and Landing Party, Event cards including Bury, Foray and Looting, and the whole Loot deck, this is an expansion overrun with piratical adventures. Do we really have to say more?
Ok, so if ‘pirates’ doesn’t convince you, let me also say that Plunder is a sequel to both Seaside and Prosperity, two of Dominion’s most popular and highly rated expansions. Plunder takes the good ideas in those expansions and doubles down on them, creating a bounty of Treasure and Duration effects. If either of those areas of Dominion excite you then Plunder is the jewel of the expansion seas.
And it’s not like Plunder just revisits old ideas. The new ways in which Duration cards can trigger provide incentives for playing in a certain way or bonuses when other players move ahead. These are interesting Durations that can influence how you build your decks and how you play your turns.
The wealth of Treasure cards similarly push the boundaries beyond Prosperity. In addition to some of them being Durations (something only seen once before), they create a fascinating dynamic between the two phases of a turn – playing Actions then Treasures. Treasure-heavy and ‘Big Money’ decks start behaving like ‘Engine Decks’. In our Dominion Strategy Guide we outlined the three basic deck structures – ‘Big Money’, ‘Engine’ and ‘Duration’ – and Plunder allows players to create hybrid decks that are all three at once, as well as providing some balance to the Engine-centric metagame.
And then there’s Loot. If you’re a fan of Non-Supply piles and unique cards then you owe it to yourself to try Plunder. The Loot deck is a lucky dip of fun and sometimes powerful cards. Cards that are worth a Gold are rarely to be sniffed at and knowing that there are only two copies of each provides a sense of risk about what you might get and satisfaction when you pull a really good one. Sure, it’s random and introduces a treasure chest’s worth of luck but that’s the whole point, the buried treasure on the map might be a bejewelled sword or just a hammer.
It’s also an accessible expansion. We talked about the density of Intrigue and how knowing how best to use a card isn’t always obvious. Plunder isn’t always simple, but the card abilities are rarely opaque. Combined with the Durations and interesting Treasures, it makes Plunder a good expansion for relative newcomers to the game. A Plunder-heavy set up provides several routes to explore, all of which make players feel like they’ve accomplished something without overtaxing the brain.
All this combines to create an expansion that’s genuinely fun to play around with, offering up regular dopamine hits of big turns and a sense of risk and excitement. That fact that it contains so much choice with all those Kingdom cards, a killer theme and some of the game’s better Event cards is the cherry on top of the piratical cake.
Why isn’t Plunder the Greatest?
Ok, shall we get this out of the way first – pirates. They suck. I get that modern society is fixated on the attractively rakish Hollywood idea of a pirate, but the reality is they were seafaring thieves who murdered, raped and more. Celebrating pirates is as problematic as Johnny Depp’s personal life, and an expansion designed around them feels wrong.
Plunder is also Dominion’s equivalent of the self-indulgent rockstar’s double album, the bloat revealing a dearth of new ideas. It’s overwhelming, and rather than taking the best ideas from previous expansions and building on them, it’s more a hodgepodge of leftovers that weren’t strong enough to use in recent releases such as Seaside Second Edition, Allies or even Empires.
Case in point: Traits. Quite possibly the worst of all the Landscape or ‘Card-shaped things’ in the game. They’re a good concept. In fact, some are great (Inherited, Pious and Cursed spring to mind) in how they change the game or what you choose to purchase. Some, like Cheap and Silver, aren’t bad but aren’t that interesting either. But over half of them (mainly ones that don’t trigger when gained) are theoretically good but frequently forgotten. It says a lot when you don’t remember or don’t care enough to take the bonus effect that most Traits provide. (They’re a little better in the digital versions of the game, simply because the electronic brain reminds you about them.)
In the ‘For’ section above we argued that Plunder was great because it’s not a dense set. Cards are rarely difficult to understand and anyone can chain huge combos together to end up with money coming out of their ears. It’s also not too tricky to get Buys, so without much effort you can be purchasing all sorts every turn. It takes the challenge out of the game for experienced players, the riches feeling unearned and unbalanced as a result. As a set it lacks nuance, a short sugar high rather than anything sustaining.
The Durations, too, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. When we covered Seaside we talked about the difficulty in keeping track of Duration cards and that’s doubled here with their asynchronous triggering. And, let’s face it, Duration cards were old hat by the time of Plunder’s release in 2022. Seaside first introduced them in 2009 and they’ve featured in every expansion since 2015’s Adventures. That’s seven expansions totalling 53 Duration cards before Plunder came along. They’re hardly novel. Plunder isn’t even the first set to feature Treasure Duration cards.
And then there’s Loot. Random. Swingy. Gimmicky.
Plunder might be fun for a couple of games but as an expansion it lacks the depth and interest that other expansions provide.
Verdict
So does Plunder sail proud in the water or has it ended up wrecked on the rocks of Dominion’s shores? For all the grousing above, Plunder is a good expansion with plenty to keep players busy and interested. It’s not top tier or the ‘greatest’ Dominion expansion, but there is so much here to explore and its contributions to the Treasure side of the game are well worth coming aboard for. Perhaps what it has most going for it is character. Traits aside this is an expansion that fully embraces both its thematic setting and the gameplay themes of Treasures and Durations. In its wholehearted commitment to its cause, it’s a bold expansion with a lot to offer those who embrace it. Its waters might be broad and shallow, but its temperament is welcoming.
What do you think? Has Plunder charted a course for your heart or would you make it walk the plank? Let us know in the comments below!
Dominion: Plunder details
- Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
- Artists: Franz Vohwinkel, Radosław Jaszczuk
- Publishers: 999 Games, ASS Altenburger Spielkarten, Hobby Japan, IUVI Games, Rio Grande Games
- Release Date: 2022
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 13+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Hand Management
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.40562 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Dominion: Plunder.
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