I've written a Randomizer App for Dominion which I believe has advantages over using the standard randomizer deck.
First off there's the obvious stuff:
- As I own all the expansions and promo cards, and sleeve everything my randomizer deck is around 10 inches tall and hard to shuffle. The app gives you a quick reasonably random shuffle without having to deal with shuffling that monstrosity between games.
- My app has a selection section where you can select which expansions, editions, and promo cards you own, and then only makes selections from what you've chosen.
- If a supply set comes up you don't like, one click and you've got a new set. You can quickly cycle through sets until one comes up you like without having to reshuffle.
Nice Features
- As you can select the sets and expansions you own, you can quickly make custom random decks, for example if you only wanted to play Dark Ages and Nocturne together, you could quickly select those two without having to sort through your randomizer deck.
- A Black Market selector.
- The Randomizer tells you all the items and stacks you will need for each supply set. If you need Bats, Ruins, Events, Landmarks, or Zombies or any other side deck you might need, and you are informed at setup time.
Unique Features - So this is where my app get interesting. I designed the app, so that by default it will use the exact recommended method of determining your supply set and the use of Shelters, and Platinums, and Collonies.
However, I feel like this is one of the weak parts of using a completely random, randomizer deck. For example consider Attack and Reaction cards. In a randomly choosen set, the odds of getting both Attack and Reaction cards in the same supply selection is not good. And getting Reaction cards with no Attack cards is kind of a waste. And in a randomizer deck if you have several expansions including the Alchemy expansion, you are highly unlikely to get more than one card in a set requiring potions in the cost. This devalues those cards in a game balancing sort of way. If you only have one card available with potions in the cost, it's much harder to justify purchasing potion cards as a competitive strategy. But the cool thing about having a computer do your randomization, is it was pretty easy to add options to add weight to certain selections, like increasing the odds of reaction cards appearing in a the supply if one or more attack cards are in the supply, and also increasing the odds of having multiple Potion cost cards in a supply set as opposed to single occurances.
So I designed selectable options you can use to cusomize the way the randomizer works. There are about 8 different selections you can make to change things like increasing the odds of reaction cards coming up if attack cards are in the supply also. And adding a clumping feature for potion cards. And a few other options. Each option is selectable, and can be combined with other options. I think using the options makes Dominion shine a little more than using true random selections.
Anyway, the app is for PC, it's quite small, one executable and one data file. If you're interested email me and I'll share.
