Was there a method to your madness when designing Dominion? How did you decide between whether you should take one solution to a problem over another?
Probably I've gone over this at length in something quoted in the forum full of my posts. Here is a summary anyway.
- I put everything in the deck just to pursue the deckbuilding idea in its most extreme form.
- You draw 5 cards a turn so you can actually see the deck you're building during the game.
- Money gets recycled because that was an obvious way to make money work; the even more obvious "put it on the table tracking itself and then discard it when you spend it" method would have the problem of "I can instantly get a tiny deck of my best cards." What could keep that deck from getting tiny instantly? Putting the money back in it, spent or not.
- The selection of cards to buy from is because I didn't have a good idea for what to do there. I initially considered a line of cards and when you buy one the more expensive cards slide down (becoming cheaper) and you add one. It seemed like, isn't the luck of what gets turned over too much? I didn't have a solution and for game one just put everything on the table, figuring at least this way we'd immediately figure out what was broken. And we liked how it played so that was that.
- You play one action because 1) that's a very simple thing, which I'd done before, and 2) it lets me make "play two actions."
- Using cards to gain cards, as the only way to do it, seemed potentially problematic, so you can buy a card without using a card. You can only buy one so I can make "+1 buy."
- The variety via different kingdom cards each game was just a natural way to provide variety. I am generally looking for a way to work in endless variety and the path here was obvious.
- There had to be VP cards every game so I put some on the table as base cards. I had three sizes initially thinking that would give you different possible goals. In the end that didn't work out as planned but the three sizes still worked out.
- Silver and Gold let you build up from Copper. Copper gives you something to buy in harsh conditions. Those harsh conditions mostly vanished, although they didn't quite.
- It was 5 Coppers 5 Estates in game one, and I tried different amounts over a few evenings before settling on 7/3 for the level of initial spending power and variety of openings it provides.
- The end condition was any empty pile because that neatly answered the question, what if a pile runs out? Normally the pile was Provinces, so it changed to any VP pile to save on cards and then to what it is to address the Duchy rush while still letting you have non-Province endings.
- Piles were 12 cards as a number that sounded like it would give everyone a chance to get a couple in a 4-player game. Later I lowered it to 10 but that was just like the original 12 because of the ending condition changing. Province stayed 12 since it was determining the game length, kingdom VP piles stayed 12 for when they were doing that, and then Duchy and Estate are 12 just to keep that rule simple.
- Curses are in the game sans Witch because maybe you have a tricky use for them and it's simpler. The pile was 45 cards when it first had a particular size; it got smaller and scaled as part of balancing Witch.
- I like icons in moderation and would have used some for the +'s but I didn't have good ones.
- I have a type line in lots of my games; they do good work. I got the idea from Magic.
- Things like "do as much as you can" come from trying over the years to work out a good general approach to the problem of how to make rules on cards work. Ditto the timing rules. Even "lose track" predates the game being published.
- Reactions initially worked the way I normally do them, which is, you can only play them at a certain time and otherwise they are like actions, they are played. Playing Moat made it weak and so Moat led to reactions just being revealed, and then Secret Chamber led to the rest of the weirdness to them. If I had it to do again I think I would stick with the initial played reactions.
- VP cards are green because I had a bunch of green paper. Reactions are blue because Moats have water in them. Sometimes it's like the decisions are made for you.