My Wife Won't Play Dominion With Me...Help!

We all know Dominion is awesome, right?

It won the Spiel Des Jahres in 2009, its spawned numerous expansions, has beautiful artwork, and plays as good as a computer game as it does as a card game.

So why won't our wives play it with us?

I suggest three reasons:

1. Anything that looks like Magic the Gathering triggers an "Ok...why don't you and your friends go downstairs with that..." response. Let's face it, if it looks medieval, then its obviously your attempt to escape to a fantasy realm, and she's not going anywhere near that.

2. There are too many cards and too much reading. The basic game (alone) comes with 500, not to mention expansion cards. Talk about overwhelming! Even Hand and Foot Canasta only uses 270, and you don't have to read those cards.

3. No meeples. Meeples rock. Not just the original Carcassone meeples either. Any wooden game pieces provide a sense of stability in the game play. They're your identifying color, you can build little towers with them when its not your turn, and if the game goes poorly you can hold other player's meeples ransom.

That's right. I said it. Hold meeples ransom.

So, we've established Dominion rocks, and we've analyzed why your wife won't play it with you, but how can you get her to warm-up to the idea?

Again, three suggestions:

1. Point out that Domion is a lot like the Drug Store Game. If you don't know what the Drug Store Game is, its basically the real life version of trashing a card to gain 2 gold and an extra buy in Dominion. Or a little bit like the Moneylender card.

2. Play it one on one. Sometimes a crowd can make Dominion a little stressful. I don't like when everybody else plays their turn so fast that I'm still struggling to shuffle my deck from my last turn. Take it slow when you teach new people and let them read the cards!

3. Bribe her. Offer to make dinner or do the dishes or anything to get her to play. Dominion is awesome right? So if you can finally get someone to play they will probably love it, its the "getting them to play" that's the hardest part.

This post is not intended to be sexist in any way. I promise. My wife beats me at games about 60% of the time! This post is about whomever is not playing Dominion with you and how to change that.

So go forth and have good luck building your dominion of Dominion players.