Thunderstone vs Dominion vs Ascension

[Happy Ent]

Hit me with your opinions, people!

I’ve played maybe a dozen games of D and and of A, and so far I prefer A.

I understand that D is supposed to be very well designed, but my overall impression, so far is that it is very private: I spend most of my time obsessing about my own hand and next move. I might as well play alone. In A there are some community cards and there is some interaction.

Also, there are other aspects to the game design that seem broken to me, in particular when compared to A: D has constraining rules (one action, one buy), which are then alleviated by some cards. Why not just remove those rules (making the game cleaner) and have the cards to extra stuff? Also, the victory conditions are just “in the way”, filling up your hand. By contrast, in A, pretty much every card does something.

I don’t like the constructs in A much, but maybe that will change. It seems that some rules scale badly: effects like “take a card from every player” or “have every other player destroy a construct” are super-powerful with 4 players but pretty weak with 2, yet cost the same.

I haven’t played Tunderstone.

Comments are welcome. Yes, I’m aware of the boardgamegeek thread.