I Wish These 5 Dominion Cards Existed

A spirit tormented by board games must have used its Diet Pepsi breath to take over my desire, because, for the past two weeks, I have been consumed by the need to play the tabletop version of Dominion, the feudal-style deck-builder. I love coming up with bite-sized strategies for its 30-minute rounds, and I’m enthused about the 2017 Nocturne expansion I recently picked up, but I’ve also come to realize that I have at least five suggestions for cards I wish existed. Here—let me share them with you.

With my suggestions, I’m hoping to address a problem I have with Dominion, the agreed-upon origin of the deck-building genre, in which players amass currency to accumulate land.

Accumulating land is not the problem. Being able to do so in a safe board game environment helps me empathize with people like Thomas Jefferson and Sam Altman without my eyes turning to dust and my face turning to dust and my hands turning to dust and my legs turning to dust. The problem is that Dominion came out in 2008. That’s the same year Madagascar 2 released and Bernie Madoff got arrested—a decidedly untrendy year.

The spirit of board games and I have been battling over this, since I like to think of myself as a pretty trendy person, on account of being born after 1994 and inundated with Amazon advertisements for the entirety of my life. So, these are the Dominion cards I wish existed to make it a little more cool, a little more modern:

Bartender Who Makes “Art” On Midjourney

• ACTION card
• +2 Cards. Look at the top five cards of your deck. Add two, replace their art with an A.I. image of Bella Hadid eating a salad with eight fingers and add to your hand; place the rest back in any order.

Microinfluencer With Telfar Bag

• ATTACK card
• Gain a Gold. Each other player gives you their wallet; post them all to Instagram Stories for your 893 followers to vote on which is cutest. You may take the contents of the cutest wallet now, or set aside for your next turn.

Woman Crying At The Metropolitan Museum of Art (I Look In The Mirror—The Woman Is Me)

• REACTION card
• When another player plays an Attack card, you may first reveal this from your hand to be told you’re “toxic” and “an energy vampire.”

Sidewalk Poop With A $1 Bill In It

• TREASURE card
• +1 Buy. This is the highlight of your week, stinky.

Lottery Ticket

• Once per game: I (Ashley) get to win the whole game and take your wallet.

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for cool Dominion cards? Let me know.