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Recently, the Fate/ community on several Social Media websites like BlueSky and Reddit has become obsessed with playing and sharing cards from a board game based on the franchise. While it isn’t uncommon for popular franchises to have Tabletop games based on them, there is something different that sets this trend apart from the others: this board game was community-made.
Yes, the board game that many Fate/ fans have been playing has almost no official relation to Type-Moon’s property itself, with only the basic ruleset being based on anything official.
Before I can explain how this situation came to be, we first need to go back to 2019 and look at the official Fate/Stay Night board game.
What is a Dominate Grail War?
In August 2019, a board game based on Type-Moon’s Fate/Stay Night was released. This board game, Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~ was developed by Fate/Grand Order’s Delightworks and designed by board game developer BakaFire.
Taking the premise of Type-Moon’s Fate/Stay Night and the Holy Grail War featured in that story (A ritual where seven teams of two individuals would fight to the death) and turning it into a Tabletop format, This simple board game would have seven players select a Master of their choice, each with their own unique card and abilities before randomly drawing a Servant who would have a unique set of skills that you could use to combat other players.
BakaFire, in many ways, was the perfect choice for turning a Visual Novel like Fate/Stay Night into a board game, as one of the company’s previous games, Tragedy Looper, was already inspired by a series of Visual Novels (07th Expansion’s When They Cry franchise).
With a team that truly understood Visual Novels, board games, and the Fate IP in charge, it was only natural that the gameplay of Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~ would catch the attention of both Fate/ fans and those who just like to play games with their friends.
How a Dominate Grail War Plays
At the start of a Dominate Grail War, players will be able to select any of the Masters from Fate/Stay Night. Each Master would have a unique skill, such as Shirou Emiya having an extra attack or Kotomine Kirei being allowed to ask other masters what class their servant is.
After the Masters are selected, each player will randomly draw a Servant from the game’s Servant Pool. Every servant would have an attack deck of twelve cards and three unique skills. While Masters are revealed immediately, Servant identities are kept secret from all other players at the table.
The board itself is segmented into four different sections: Magic Workshop, Miyama, Shinto, and Recon. During the prep phase of each turn, an Event card is placed in the Magic Workshop while Objective cards are placed in Miyama and Shinto.
Event Cards determine how much mana players obtain at the start of a turn, as well as an additional gameplay mechanic that will affect all battlefields during that turn, such as Agility-type Attacks having +1 power during that turn.
In comparison, Objective Cards only affect the battlefield on which they are placed on and often have more drastic effects. One example of an Objective Card is Break Bounded Field, which prevents players from using Special-type attacks on a battlefield, which can change how a turn plays out entirely.
The turn structure then transitions into the Outpost Phase, where players can deploy to the Magic Workshop, Miyama, or Shinto. No battles may occur in the Magic Workshop (which instead gives players extra Mana) while those who are in Miyama or Shinto will instead compete for a set number of Victory Points that are printed on that Battlefield’s current Objective Card.
Once each player has deployed, the game transitions into the Action Phase. During this phase, each player selects two cards from either their Attack Deck or Skill Zone in order to win their battlefield. A player who knows they cannot win any fights this turn can instead choose to run to recon, which rewards 2 Victory Points to the first player who moves there.
While Skills are more powerful than cards in your Attack Deck and often have extra abilities printed on them, such as Rider Class, allowing players to play multiple extra cards from their deck, they cannot be played unless you have at least 8 mana. So players may want to hold back for a turn to conserve their mana or focus on attacking players who have less mana than they do.
After each player has played their attacks, the game transitions into its final phase: Combat. During this phase, players must calculate their power totals and activate any skills that delay their effects until the Combat Phase. Any player who wins a battlefield will obtain the Victory Points that are printed on the Objective Cards.
At the end of each round, players move their Master’s token on the board to represent how many Victory Points they currently have. At the end of the game’s eighth round, players begin to be eliminated from the game until the final round ends in a 1v1 fight between the two surviving Masters.
Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~ was a very simple yet fun board game due to the complex round structure and how each Master and Servant combination would change how you approach the board. However, it is also not the focus of this article, nor is it the version of this game that most people are familiar with.
Instead, the board game that the Fate/ fanbase has begun to champion is a homebrewed modification of the game known as Fate/Domination.
CareSim’s Fate/Domination
Like most fun-to-play board games, it was inevitable that a dedicated fan would discover it and import it to Berserk Games’ Tabletop Simulator, a platform that can be used to recreate and play board games online with friends. In this case, that dedicated fan was a man by the name of Caresim.
In 2023, nearly four years after the release of Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~, Caresim would release his version of the game for Tabletop Simulator.
While the basic round structure and rules format from Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~ were kept in this version of the game, many of the cards were edited, and some additional characters, such as Angra Mainyu, were added.
These card changes ranged from small buffs or nerfs to completely reworking how a skill worked, such as Archer Class being changed from working only on battlefields to being able to be played from other locations, such as Recon.
When asked about why he became interested in Dominate Grail War ~Fate/stay night on Board Game~, Caresim had this statement to give:
“I’m both a massive board game player and the OG Fate/Stay Night VN is one of my favorite stories. I always thought it would make for a cool game, and stumbled upon it basically at random. I usually don’t put much faith in licensed titles like that, but this one was made by bakafire, who I know from their other, more famous title Tragedy Looper, which is an incredibly good adaptation of the 07th expansion vn’s into the board game format, so that reassured me a bit that the game might actually be decent. Since the game is not available outside of Japan, I made a custom print and play version to play with my friends with a couple homebrew masters and servants thrown in…
…and then Covid happened. I think you can imagine the rest ^^”
This Tabletop Simulator version of the game was quickly adopted by the Fate/ community as their preferred way to play and was swiftly given a new name to separate it from Dominate the Grail War: Fate/Domination.
The Fate/Domination Community
This version of the game would be the spark that set the community alight, as soon many fans of Fate/ were trying this obscure board game and learning to play. When asked about what drew Fate fans to the board game and what was enjoyable about it, one member of the community, Cnnimnaon, had this to say.
“I think the game generally does a very good job of getting across the personalities and abilties (sic) of the Servants and Masters in a way thats also fun to play. I’m a big fan of asymmetrical political board games, and Fate/Domination does those aspects very well. It really captures both the feel of playing with larger than life Servants with big swingy abilities, and that core factor of canon Fate Grail Wars that is making short lived alliances to try and further your own goals. All in all it makes for a very smooth play experience that is both evocative and entertaining.”
As highlighted by both Cnnimnaon and Caresim’s quotes, Fate/Domination’s Servant Skill cards are focused around getting a servant’s personality across in only a few attacks. From Chacha’s skills being centered around her using an opponent’s own resources to weaken them, to Bartholomew Roberts preferring to negotiate deals than directly fight opponents, one can expect their favorite Servants to be portrayed just as accurately as a title like Fate/Grand Order would.
What has truly made this game impressive though, is the community and how dedicated they have become to creating new Master and Servants for players to draw and play as during a match. While the original version of the game only included characters from Fate/Stay Night, the current version of the game has been expanded to include hundreds of characters from all across the Nasuverse.
CareSim’s version of the game included several homebrewed Masters and Servants, but once other players got their hands on the board, it became an expansive community effort to add as many characters to the game as possible. The reason for this is because the gameplay loop and cards of Fate/Domination is excellent at getting across the actual personality of the characters involved in a way few other board games do.
One member of the community, whose custom Masters and Servants are found at most tables, Vil, had the following comments to give about the gameplay of Fate/Domination and how well it portrays each character who has been added since:
“While the gameplay itself of Fate/Domination is quite fun, with all the table politics required to truly come out on top and the varied kits that all Masters and Servants have, allowing for cool combos and moments, my favorite part is absolutely the theming.
The way each character represents their personality, their abilities, their story, is easily the coolest thing about the game. Masters and Servants alike are adapted in a way that they both make sense in terms of narrative cohesion to their character and play how you’d expect them to play. I’ve said it already, but to me it’s extremely important that characters feel like themselves and make you, the player, easily immersed in their own personal story.
The sheer number of them is also a major upside, as even if you only pick one Master for all your games, your experience is still likely to be very different each time you get into a game. Part of it is because the gameplay itself of Fate/Domination is basically built on this variety, with Servants starting out as hidden, you will always be either surprised when someone finally reveals who they have been playing or you can feel smart by figuring it out before they do, and that’s always pretty cool, in my opinion.
Now, Fate/Domination isn’t perfect and there are some official Caresim-made characters that I think could have been adapted better, but he’s done a marvelous job for basically 90% of the available roster, which is an incredible feat! And sure, some are better than others, but it’s (for the most part) a surprisingly balanced game, in my opinion.
For fans of the series that may not have seen the game already, I highly recommend taking a look at the characters in the Tabletop Simulator Mod or the public wiki for the game, just to read through them. If they are anything like me, they’ll be at the very least amused at most of them, if not become interested in trying the game out!”
In addition to adding hundreds of characters from Fate itself, many people in the community have taken the time to apply Fate/Domination’s versatile gameplay to nearly any franchise that has characters in it. This has resulted in entire sub-communities with their own side projects like making as many Pokémon or as many characters from Honkai: Star Rail playable as possible.
Whether you are a fan of Game of Thrones, Pokémon, or The Ring, chances are that someone in the ever-growing Fate/Domination community has made several custom cards for you to use.
The versatility of Fate/Domination’s gameplay has also led to several custom rulesets and boards for the game, such as a board based on the Holy Grail War from Fate/Apocrypha instead of the one from Fate/Stay Night.
This separate board seats ten players instead of seven, has fourteen rounds instead of twelve, and separates the ten players into two teams of five instead of having them all fight each other in a free-for-all. While games on this board often take six hours to complete due to the high number of players and the strategizing required for a large game, it is also an unforgettable experience that is perfect for large friend groups.
The English Fate/Domination community isn’t the only one that has been developing this game into a board game monolith, as a Chinese branch of the community exists, which has been developing their own custom characters who often play by a completely different ruleset than their English equivalents.
While I myself have not been in contact with the Chinese community, I have reached out to a member of the English community, Cnnimnaon, who has spent many hours translating Chinese cards to English about how this branch of the game differs from the English one.
“In general the Chinese community tends to do more complex mechanics than the english side of the game. Its a pretty natural consequence of the fact that Chinese characters tend to be far more compact than English ones, allowing for ideas that just wouldn’t fit on English cards without some seriously clever wording tricks and very small font. There’s also a very different level of balance, with Masters often tending towards the higher end of the balance curve established in base Fate/Domination. You also definitely notice a larger range of Type Moon characters from there, with a lot of less well known material and even fan works getting Servants, while that niche is instead filled by non-Type Moon characters in the english community, which is a super interesting detail. Recently, for example, they’ve been working on the Caster Fate/Empire of Dirt (sic), a Canadian doujin circle’s fan work, which is the kind of more obscure work you don’t tend to see in the English community.”
To me, Fate/Domination is one of the ultimate expressions of unity within a fanbase. All corners of the Fate/ fanbase have come together to make one of the most expansive and fun board game experiences in recent years.
If you are a fan of Fate/, I would highly recommend trying out Fate/Domination with a group of friends via Caresim’s mod for Tabletop Simulator. Then if you enjoy your time consider checking out the official Fate/Domination Discord, where dozens of custom characters are created each month.
@Master 6/7. Lobby up.
Any +1?
@Custom Domination Green Ping