Dominion: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Dominion is a card game for two to four players, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008; Hobby Japan released a complete Japanese edition in 2009. Every player starts from the same small deck and buys cards from a common supply to improve it, drawing those new cards on later turns, so the deck itself is what each player builds over the game, and whoever ends with the most victory points wins. English Wikipedia calls it the first deck-building game and says it inspired a genre built on that central mechanic, and Japanese Wikipedia adds that its success produced countless followers, board games that took up deck-building one after another. In 2009 it won the Spiel des Jahres, the Deutscher Spiele Preis and the À la carte card game award, the first game to take all three German game awards. An officially licensed digital version by Temple Gates Games has been on Steam since February 2024. It is the origin of the deck-building lineage, games in which growing your own deck as you play is the heart of the design.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
Photogenic Minds : Identity Buried gem
Per Steam's own listing, this is a deck-building 3D exploration psycho-horror. You walk an endlessly looping corridor and photograph objects called subjects, and each shot becomes a photo with a special power; you build your deck from those photos, and a run ends when you find and collect the soul of the dead at the corridor's end. To work out where that soul is, a logic-puzzle element has you deduce the dead person's traits and name. Situations are generated at random, you collect strange detective tools along the way, and if it feels too hard, the store says you can bring in powerful tools and force everything through. Twelve hours, from 0:00 PM to 0:00 AM, flow through the corridor, and the store asks you to control time with the power of photographs and get through the night in Rederlin, a city of frequent supernatural events that cannot get past the night; its story opens with Jennifer Silentfall, who runs a detective business there. The developer and publisher is 727 Not Hound: AUTOMATON's Japanese edition names the developer as Mr. Zama, a Japanese solo developer, with 727 Not Hound as his developer name, and Denfaminicogamer also introduces 727 Not Hound as a Japanese solo game developer. This is the third 727 Not Hound game on this site, after Days Like A Nightmare and International Designated Anomaly No.123: Abandoned Village. It grew out of a prototype, P.M. (Playable Mockup), which is still free on the Japanese freeware site Freem; that prototype is not a free version of this game, and a separate paid Playable Mockup is also on Steam. Released on September 29, 2022 as version 0.9 (the version 1.0 update followed on October 15, 2022), it is Very Positive at 89 percent across 98 reviews (87 positive), a paid title at ¥1,900, not free and not in Early Access. By language, 92 of the 98 reviews are in Japanese (81 positive; the Japanese reviews alone also rate Very Positive), with 4 in Simplified Chinese, 1 in Traditional Chinese, 1 in Korean and none in English, and all 11 negative reviews are Japanese. It supports Japanese only, although near the top of the English store page, right after the first sentence, the line '*English will be supported.' still stands, a promise that has not been kept. It has had press: in Japanese, AUTOMATON covered it four times (the announcement, the release-date news, a paragraph in a column and a one-line sale mention) and Denfaminicogamer twice, and AUTOMATON WEST ran the announcement in English. No review or feature devoted to this game alone turned up, and with 0 English reviews it has not reached English-speaking players. Honest notes on its state: the last Steam announcement is from April 2023, and a February 2023 announcement said some achievements already existed but could not yet be earned. In July 2025 the developer wrote on X that the SSD holding the project files had been corrupted, making updates to the current version impossible, and that the game would be rebuilt from scratch under the Japanese subtitle オーバーホールド, offered as a free update rather than a new purchase, with the current version kept playable through Steam's build switching, and a release planned between the end of that year and March 2026. In March 2026 the developer wrote that a complete rebuild from scratch is planned, that talks with a publisher over funding are underway, and that the development already started will continue even if those talks fail; no new date was given, and the rebuild has not been released. One Japanese negative review on Steam, from June 2026, reads in full: 未完成 ('unfinished'). On performance, AUTOMATON's October 2022 column said the heavy performance, among other things, made it hard to recommend casually; the developer later announced fixes for excessive memory use and for slowdowns during repeated play, and in April 2023 removed a memory-leak countermeasure that had put a very heavy load on some systems. How it runs today is unconfirmed. On the prototype's Freem page, the developer adds that any similarity to a game where you exorcise spirits with a camera is coincidental.