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Variants and Fan Cards / Fan expansion: Pandemonium
« on: September 01, 2017, 04:50:37 pm »
Hi guys! I'm new to this forum but have been playing Dominion for quite some years... Last summer I decided to try and develop my own expansion. I've been somewhat nervous about posting it here, but after a year of playtesting and tweaking I think it's fair to say that it's a pretty good expansion. Me and my friends had a lot of fun creating it as well as playing it.
DOMINION: PANDEMONIUM
You always figured this would happen some day: Your kingdom is coming to an end. Sure, you didn't really expect an apocalypse, full with angels and demons, and more like a revolution or a slow process of democratization, but then again you're not the only one surprised. You want to ask your trusted advisor for help, but the smell of sulfur in his room tells you he has already left, and you can't bring yourself to trust the new guy with the red horns and the flame on his head. How does he keep that on, even? You're slowly starting to worry whether you'll pass the test of heavenly judgement, and also it's been raining ash for days, just when you were going to mow the lawn. On the other hand, the lawn has turned into an abyss into the lower circles of hell, so perhaps there's a silver horizon there. Just as you're packing your stuff for your travel into oblivion, you hear the preacher at the corner shouting: "The end is near!". Really, you hardly noticed.. Credit to Asper for this great introduction text!
The concept was to make an attack heavy set with a dark undertone primarily based on the function of conditional duration cards. It's partly reflected in the fact of that the most of the cards could be considered evil. The art is also rather gritty. Some pictures are references to stories of the Bible such as the expelling of Lucifer or the adoration of the golden calf. Some are references to generic evil beasts and creatures. I've been trying to appropriately reference the actual artists of the pictures but sometimes they're really diffcult to find.
Gameplaywise, me and my playtesting buddies wanted to achieve some "new" main functions of the set. The biggest one is the conditional duration cards. These cards are primarily what makes the set fun to play. Take Sinister Plot for an example. At a cost of 2 gold and a terminal action you can put away a card for a later time. Extremely useful if your deck is cluttered or if you just want that devilish combination after. It comes with the terminal action which sometimes really makes a difficult decision for you wether to play it or not. We tried just rushing gold and only buying this card but it lost to some more nuanced play. Many of the duration cards are created with the thought of battling the natural random elements of the game.
The second one was a function of a lesser curse card. I wanted to implement an untrashable curse card or a -VP card that was different than the normal one and experimented quite some with them. However it was EXTREMELY boring to play with and we swayed to an solution that is more nuanced, and slightly weaker so that it could be used either as an attack or tactical card. The solution was Hell and Heaven victory cards. Heaven cards are straight forward, they're a bit slow, but you'd generally want them. Hell on the other hand is a lot more intresting. Either you may use it as an attack on the opponents, rather quickly cluttering their hands but also giving them those delicious extra VP's. Or, cluttering your own hand but giving you those extra VP's... However theres always a risk of playing to greedy... A really fun way of playing! I should mention that purgatory is an exemplaric addition to these cards, and also when we've mixed it into other sets. It's basically an Island but faster to play.
What we ended up with was this set of cards. In the end a rather aggressive, psychological and tactical set with a really nice dark feeling to it. Absolutely amazing to play +3 players on, because of the feeling that you constantly are under attack (even though you aren't). But enough talking here are the full card sheets.
I hope those of you who try it out will have as fun playing it as we've had and if you have opinions on balance or questions, feel free to write! Critisism is very welcome!
Raw facts: Consists of 286 cards. (We solved this by sleeving coppers and silvers. Not ideal...)
(10 of each); Angel, Annihilation, Betrayal, Church, Demon, Desolation, Devil, Exile, Fallen Angel, Forsaken Village, Heretic, Idol, Imp, Imposter, Raid, Rally Point, Reanimation, Salvation, Siege, Sinister Plot, Soul Market, Succubus and Vanguard
(12); Purgatory
(16); Heaven
(30); Hell
7 attack cards, 2 reaction cards, 3 victory cards, 4 duration cards, 1 treasure card and 10 normal action cards.
15 (17* counting Rally Point and Vanguard) Terminal actions, 1 (3* counting Vanguard and Rally Point) cards granting +2 actions, 6 (7* counting Idol) cards that grants extra gold, 7 (9* counting Desolation and Soul Market) granting extra cards and 3 cards giving + Buy.
Disclaimers: The function of the conditional duration cards was a bitch to balance, firstly most of them had a way of being cancelled by other players, which made them situationally too powerful. We also had WAY too many attack cards from the beginning, up to 13 individual cards, we had to massively reduce them to make the game playable. Sadly this means that the card "Siege" might be useless in certain lineups since it requires at least one attack card. So far I haven't found a nice solution to this but it also haven't disturbed me so much until now.
I am aware of that the text on the cost of the cards aren't the ones used in the original set. I didn't find the font sadly but I took a similar enough one for it. I also didn't find a template for a pure treasure card, so I did a weird solution of turning an action treasure card into one. I did also not find a template for reaction-victory which made me create this abomination of it...
I do not own any art presented in these cards and no intellectual copyright for the game Dominion.
Edit 1: Removed the old flavour text and used Aspers one instead!
Edit 2: Made the sheets optional to view, saving some space. Reduced text size at certain points for the same reason.
DOMINION: PANDEMONIUM
You always figured this would happen some day: Your kingdom is coming to an end. Sure, you didn't really expect an apocalypse, full with angels and demons, and more like a revolution or a slow process of democratization, but then again you're not the only one surprised. You want to ask your trusted advisor for help, but the smell of sulfur in his room tells you he has already left, and you can't bring yourself to trust the new guy with the red horns and the flame on his head. How does he keep that on, even? You're slowly starting to worry whether you'll pass the test of heavenly judgement, and also it's been raining ash for days, just when you were going to mow the lawn. On the other hand, the lawn has turned into an abyss into the lower circles of hell, so perhaps there's a silver horizon there. Just as you're packing your stuff for your travel into oblivion, you hear the preacher at the corner shouting: "The end is near!". Really, you hardly noticed.. Credit to Asper for this great introduction text!
The concept was to make an attack heavy set with a dark undertone primarily based on the function of conditional duration cards. It's partly reflected in the fact of that the most of the cards could be considered evil. The art is also rather gritty. Some pictures are references to stories of the Bible such as the expelling of Lucifer or the adoration of the golden calf. Some are references to generic evil beasts and creatures. I've been trying to appropriately reference the actual artists of the pictures but sometimes they're really diffcult to find.
Gameplaywise, me and my playtesting buddies wanted to achieve some "new" main functions of the set. The biggest one is the conditional duration cards. These cards are primarily what makes the set fun to play. Take Sinister Plot for an example. At a cost of 2 gold and a terminal action you can put away a card for a later time. Extremely useful if your deck is cluttered or if you just want that devilish combination after. It comes with the terminal action which sometimes really makes a difficult decision for you wether to play it or not. We tried just rushing gold and only buying this card but it lost to some more nuanced play. Many of the duration cards are created with the thought of battling the natural random elements of the game.
The second one was a function of a lesser curse card. I wanted to implement an untrashable curse card or a -VP card that was different than the normal one and experimented quite some with them. However it was EXTREMELY boring to play with and we swayed to an solution that is more nuanced, and slightly weaker so that it could be used either as an attack or tactical card. The solution was Hell and Heaven victory cards. Heaven cards are straight forward, they're a bit slow, but you'd generally want them. Hell on the other hand is a lot more intresting. Either you may use it as an attack on the opponents, rather quickly cluttering their hands but also giving them those delicious extra VP's. Or, cluttering your own hand but giving you those extra VP's... However theres always a risk of playing to greedy... A really fun way of playing! I should mention that purgatory is an exemplaric addition to these cards, and also when we've mixed it into other sets. It's basically an Island but faster to play.
What we ended up with was this set of cards. In the end a rather aggressive, psychological and tactical set with a really nice dark feeling to it. Absolutely amazing to play +3 players on, because of the feeling that you constantly are under attack (even though you aren't). But enough talking here are the full card sheets.
Quote
http://i.imgur.com/25xWA8v.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BVHxE1j.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/FpUy79g.jpg
I hope those of you who try it out will have as fun playing it as we've had and if you have opinions on balance or questions, feel free to write! Critisism is very welcome!
Raw facts: Consists of 286 cards. (We solved this by sleeving coppers and silvers. Not ideal...)
(10 of each); Angel, Annihilation, Betrayal, Church, Demon, Desolation, Devil, Exile, Fallen Angel, Forsaken Village, Heretic, Idol, Imp, Imposter, Raid, Rally Point, Reanimation, Salvation, Siege, Sinister Plot, Soul Market, Succubus and Vanguard
(12); Purgatory
(16); Heaven
(30); Hell
7 attack cards, 2 reaction cards, 3 victory cards, 4 duration cards, 1 treasure card and 10 normal action cards.
15 (17* counting Rally Point and Vanguard) Terminal actions, 1 (3* counting Vanguard and Rally Point) cards granting +2 actions, 6 (7* counting Idol) cards that grants extra gold, 7 (9* counting Desolation and Soul Market) granting extra cards and 3 cards giving + Buy.
Disclaimers: The function of the conditional duration cards was a bitch to balance, firstly most of them had a way of being cancelled by other players, which made them situationally too powerful. We also had WAY too many attack cards from the beginning, up to 13 individual cards, we had to massively reduce them to make the game playable. Sadly this means that the card "Siege" might be useless in certain lineups since it requires at least one attack card. So far I haven't found a nice solution to this but it also haven't disturbed me so much until now.
I am aware of that the text on the cost of the cards aren't the ones used in the original set. I didn't find the font sadly but I took a similar enough one for it. I also didn't find a template for a pure treasure card, so I did a weird solution of turning an action treasure card into one. I did also not find a template for reaction-victory which made me create this abomination of it...
I do not own any art presented in these cards and no intellectual copyright for the game Dominion.
Edit 1: Removed the old flavour text and used Aspers one instead!
Edit 2: Made the sheets optional to view, saving some space. Reduced text size at certain points for the same reason.