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Variants and Fan Cards / Up to Date Guide to Fan Card Creation
« on: January 06, 2020, 05:37:32 am »
The stickied guide by rinkworks highlights common pitfalls to avoid, costing your cards, and how you can make and print your ideas. It is completely right in its introduction:
If you just want the mechanics know-how, go straight to the Research section.
Spineflu wrote a fusion of these two guides, with some extra details, here on the wiki.
Dominion is a very simple, highly flexible game model, and it's very easy to add to. With that flexibility, though, is the potential to land upon uninteresting ideas. While they may not break the game and be imbalanced, your ideas could get to be disappointing in some way after playing with them for a while. Particularly disappointing if you went through the trouble of getting them printed out.
If a house is going to be safe to live in and stand a long time, it has to meet high building standards. Some may meet those standards, but also be a bit boring or offer poor quality of living. Similarly, Dominion cards may be safe but not give a great play experience.
This guide offers suggestions for making your good ideas into great ones for the long term before the final send-off to print, big reveal to your friends, etc.; it goes through the design process, identifying where people can take a bad turn, aiming to help refine your card ideas to be just what you want them to be.
I talk a bit about expansion design. You might consider making one as an extra level of interest that involves more depth than making individual cards. Parts referring to expansion design will be in this font.
TL;DR
A note from the author
This guide may look like a rather serious look into the field of Dominion design, but I'm well aware this isn't the most important thing in life! I just settled into playing and learning the game, the idea of making custom cards came up some day, and I fell in love with the thought instantly. I like designing, and Dominion is a simple yet diverse game that is amazingly expandable, yet with traps to avoid. It's been such an interesting process!
It feels exactly the same as playing with Lego to me. The different mechanics of Dominion are like the different pieces in the Lego set, and the cards and expansions I've made are the models.
This guide is the product of several years of casual exploration, written through personal interest and seeing how the forum is continually active. I haven't playtested any of my designs with others or printed any out.
A frank note: have a balanced view of your designs and projects. If you obsess over them, you will never feel satisfied. With all my enthusiasm I have become quite materialistic about my designs at times, chasing after perfection and loving the ideas I considered already perfect too much. This could get very distracting when it was time for important things. The perfect game is less about what the game is, and more about when it is played; provided the content is clean and decent. It is just for recreation, and recreation is supposed to satisfy. Trying to make the perfect Dominion will lead to frustration.
On the positive, the design skills and principles fan card creation can develop can be very practical for important work. If this guide helps you pick some up then I'm happy!
Glossary
Replayability refers to how well a design maintains its interest when played with in lots of different games.
Flavour and theme are used interchangeably to refer to a card's name and its story, and how the other properties of the card connect to it. Mechanics and functions/functionality refers to everything the card can do. A card's properties are its name, abilities, types and cost.
A play theme is a way of building a deck. A thin deck that plays itself every turn (an engine) or a thicker deck with lots of Treasures (called big money) are two example play themes.
Direct payload refers to anything that can directly help getting ahead on VP, so
, +Buys, 
tokens, gaining Victory cards and sometimes cursing Attacks. Drawing cards, gaining non-Victory cards, other Attacks, and trashing junk would all be indirect payload.
All random games are those where all 10 kingdom cards and landscape cards are randomly selected.
VP is short for Victory Points. Alt VP cards are those that can provide alternative victory point options to the usual Provinces and Duchies, e.g Gardens.
Terminal Action effects are those that use up an Action, to potentially terminate your Action phase. Any that give +1 or more Actions, or that are on Treasure or Night cards, are described as non-terminal.
Cantrips are non-terminal cards that also draw.
Deck cycle time refers to the game time taken for a card to be drawn into hand. A card gained onto deck takes much less deck cycle time to get to hand than one gained to the discard pile.
Contents
Situation (your audience, aim, motive)
Design Brief (the project's aim)
Research (Lots of really useful stuff to know all in one place)
Specification (checklist for your project)
Design Ideas (putting card designs together)
Testing (proving your cards balanced, fun, simple)
Final Outcome (ways to publish)
Now let's follow the order of the design process and apply it to Dominion. No matter how you make your ideas, with paper notes or mental ones, casually or organised, you're going through the same process to get to your final outcome. Even if you have ideas down already, it may be beneficial to step back and look at the basics, to identify where design flaws actually are.
Important points are highlighted in bold.
The first rule about creating custom fan cards for Dominion is that you can ignore every single rule about it if you want to. Dominion is a game. Its purpose is fun. If you've got a card idea that sounds fun, do it. Playtest it. If it remains fun after scrutiny, keep playing with it.This is kind of an update and fork from that guide. It covers all the present mechanics, and describes the whole design process for those new to fan card creation.
If you just want the mechanics know-how, go straight to the Research section.
Spineflu wrote a fusion of these two guides, with some extra details, here on the wiki.
Dominion is a very simple, highly flexible game model, and it's very easy to add to. With that flexibility, though, is the potential to land upon uninteresting ideas. While they may not break the game and be imbalanced, your ideas could get to be disappointing in some way after playing with them for a while. Particularly disappointing if you went through the trouble of getting them printed out.
If a house is going to be safe to live in and stand a long time, it has to meet high building standards. Some may meet those standards, but also be a bit boring or offer poor quality of living. Similarly, Dominion cards may be safe but not give a great play experience.
This guide offers suggestions for making your good ideas into great ones for the long term before the final send-off to print, big reveal to your friends, etc.; it goes through the design process, identifying where people can take a bad turn, aiming to help refine your card ideas to be just what you want them to be.
I talk a bit about expansion design. You might consider making one as an extra level of interest that involves more depth than making individual cards. Parts referring to expansion design will be in this font.
TL;DR
- Be open minded. When you get an immediate good feeling for an idea, note it down straight away.
- Know the rules and makeup of Dominion well (but you don't have to be a top pro player). Refer to the Research section for help.
- Creativity blocks and lack of inspiration are possible with longer projects. Don't try to battle through if you're on a time constraint, rather factor them in to your schedule. Keep clear notes so you know what you're doing when you come back.
- To make a design fun to play long term, focus on the mechanics first, then its theme. The more open it is to interactions, the more replayable it will be and hence interesting long term; but if it's strong in every game, it won't be interesting.
- Put yourself in a player's shoes and see what mental skills and strategic thinking your design stimulates.
- With designs incorporating player interaction, always let decisions opponents make involve them thinking about their own advantage.
- Individual card designs start with a brief. It should state a required property or mechanic, and be understandable to another person.
- Each card you make should be on the same power level as the official ones.
- Imagine your design in a game whenever you make a change to it, to see how every other aspect of it is affected. Running a few solo tests may help.
- You should be able to sum up what your card designs do in one quick sentence.
- For testing simplicity, get another player to explain what your ideas do.
- Upvotes on this forum show a good first impression, not necessarily a good overall design.
- Be realistic. Dominion has flaws that fan cards can't overcome.
A note from the author
This guide may look like a rather serious look into the field of Dominion design, but I'm well aware this isn't the most important thing in life! I just settled into playing and learning the game, the idea of making custom cards came up some day, and I fell in love with the thought instantly. I like designing, and Dominion is a simple yet diverse game that is amazingly expandable, yet with traps to avoid. It's been such an interesting process!
It feels exactly the same as playing with Lego to me. The different mechanics of Dominion are like the different pieces in the Lego set, and the cards and expansions I've made are the models.
This guide is the product of several years of casual exploration, written through personal interest and seeing how the forum is continually active. I haven't playtested any of my designs with others or printed any out.
A frank note: have a balanced view of your designs and projects. If you obsess over them, you will never feel satisfied. With all my enthusiasm I have become quite materialistic about my designs at times, chasing after perfection and loving the ideas I considered already perfect too much. This could get very distracting when it was time for important things. The perfect game is less about what the game is, and more about when it is played; provided the content is clean and decent. It is just for recreation, and recreation is supposed to satisfy. Trying to make the perfect Dominion will lead to frustration.
On the positive, the design skills and principles fan card creation can develop can be very practical for important work. If this guide helps you pick some up then I'm happy!
Glossary
Replayability refers to how well a design maintains its interest when played with in lots of different games.
Flavour and theme are used interchangeably to refer to a card's name and its story, and how the other properties of the card connect to it. Mechanics and functions/functionality refers to everything the card can do. A card's properties are its name, abilities, types and cost.
A play theme is a way of building a deck. A thin deck that plays itself every turn (an engine) or a thicker deck with lots of Treasures (called big money) are two example play themes.
Direct payload refers to anything that can directly help getting ahead on VP, so
, +Buys, tokens, gaining Victory cards and sometimes cursing Attacks. Drawing cards, gaining non-Victory cards, other Attacks, and trashing junk would all be indirect payload.All random games are those where all 10 kingdom cards and landscape cards are randomly selected.
VP is short for Victory Points. Alt VP cards are those that can provide alternative victory point options to the usual Provinces and Duchies, e.g Gardens.
Terminal Action effects are those that use up an Action, to potentially terminate your Action phase. Any that give +1 or more Actions, or that are on Treasure or Night cards, are described as non-terminal.
Cantrips are non-terminal cards that also draw.
Deck cycle time refers to the game time taken for a card to be drawn into hand. A card gained onto deck takes much less deck cycle time to get to hand than one gained to the discard pile.
Contents
Situation (your audience, aim, motive)
Design Brief (the project's aim)
Research (Lots of really useful stuff to know all in one place)
Specification (checklist for your project)
Design Ideas (putting card designs together)
Testing (proving your cards balanced, fun, simple)
Final Outcome (ways to publish)
Now let's follow the order of the design process and apply it to Dominion. No matter how you make your ideas, with paper notes or mental ones, casually or organised, you're going through the same process to get to your final outcome. Even if you have ideas down already, it may be beneficial to step back and look at the basics, to identify where design flaws actually are.
Important points are highlighted in bold.
