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Rio Grande Figures Out a Way to Bring Most All Gamers to the Table

A game that I have been really impressed with lately has been Dominion. It's not only a really popular game with customers but it is also a really popular game with everyone who works at my store. Rio Grande is a great game as is indicated by it's current position (#6) on the Board Game Geek rankings. 

The reason that I think that this game is so popular and so successful is that it has appeal factor to casual gamers, board game geeks, card game players, strategists and everything in between. There is the feel of a collectible card game to it without the kind of monetary investment that comes with most card games of it's complexity. 

One of the things about this game that is so instantly brilliant is that it appeals to all kinds ofplayers because you can play it with any sort of approach. Players who love to play combo decks can find themselves any number of different combinations of cards to just run through play after play after play. Aggressive players can just buy up cheap cards super fast and get their victory points in a quantity of small bits as opposed to shooting the moon for the larger point cards. Defensive players can just fill their decks with cards to keep players off balance and to protect your hand at all times.

The game is brilliantly well balanced and has all kinds of variety right in the first box as there are plenty of different types of cards and each game only utilizes 10 of them. But what I think is best about the game is that the recent expansion brings a whole new kind of innovation and interesting concepts to the game. Introducing cards that, for the first time, contribute to the ongoing portion of the game and score victory points when the game concludes.

I really think that Rio Grande has a winner that adds a whole new realm of gaming to the tabletop and has a limitless potential for growth and variety.

Reader Comments (1)

The ultimate test of how good of a game is whether non-gamers will play it and enjoy it enough to be willing to play again. Dominion passes - my wife and I actually played three games the other night. She's not a gamer by any stretch - while she will play an occasional Settlers of Catan when we have company, she won't look at Magic, won't think about EVE, and even had doubts about Dominion until she played a game and figured out that it was all about strategy.

Doesn't hurt that she enjoyed Chaucer in college and the theme is Medieval.

June 28, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJeremy Loscheider

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