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Author Topic: Interview with Donald X.  (Read 2126886 times)

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heron

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #650 on: February 10, 2013, 10:37:52 am »
0

When I read ozle's post, I thought it was written by Donald. It made it much stranger.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #651 on: February 10, 2013, 10:50:16 am »
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When I read ozle's post, I thought it was written by Donald. It made it much stranger.
Oh wow, I just imaged Donald X. using the third person when referring to himself. It was kawaii.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #652 on: February 10, 2013, 01:00:43 pm »
0

Funny story, was playing some dominion with a new guy last night, and he kept name dropping Donald X's posts on BGG like they were personal conversations. Was very amusing.

"Oh yeah, well Donald X told me on BGG that this card is because of ......"
"Donald says that this card was originally in Prosperity ......"

All that knowledge at his fingertips and he was still rubbish at the game!

It's not very nice to make fun of new guys.  >:(

What?
Not only did I not make fun of him, I was very polite to him. Just sharing that I thought it was funny someone came giving it the big talk and actually all it was just all through reading Donalds posts (which is how it linked to this thread because it was mentioned he posts here a lot above) and no real experience, showing that theory talk is no substitute for actually playing sometimes.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #653 on: February 10, 2013, 08:03:26 pm »
0

Donald of the games you haven't designed, what is your favorite?
Magic: The Gathering by a significant margin. I played from 1994 to 2006, winding down in 2007 due to Dominion. I still read Mark Rosewater's tumblr and his Monday article on wizards.com, and look at the spoilers for the new sets. Gatecrash looks great, I have considered buying a commons/uncommons set for cubes in case I ever have a window where I play some more.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #654 on: February 10, 2013, 09:46:11 pm »
+2

What color is the Guild's box?

Why is Rats your favorite card?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #655 on: February 10, 2013, 09:49:37 pm »
0

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?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #656 on: February 10, 2013, 09:53:33 pm »
0

What color is the Guild's box?

Why is Rats your favorite card?

I am eager for absolutely any tidbit about Guilds.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #657 on: February 10, 2013, 11:09:43 pm »
0

What color is the Guild's box?

Why is Rats your favorite card?
I have not seen the Guilds box.

I like that you hurt yourself with Rats but it may all work out (if it didn't work out then you wouldn't do it and so it wouldn't hurt you either). I like how it's a drastically different way to go from your starting to deck to your ending deck. I like how exotic it is. The combos are satisfying to execute.
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #658 on: February 10, 2013, 11:50:32 pm »
+7

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.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #659 on: February 11, 2013, 11:48:08 am »
+5

- 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.

I'm glad you didn't have a bunch of pink paper. Calling it "Pinking" instead of "Greening" would be awkward.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #660 on: February 12, 2013, 02:16:24 pm »
+1

"Pinking" is Swenglish for urinating.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #661 on: February 12, 2013, 05:05:54 pm »
+2

Donald, do you have any pictures of your original version? (I'm talking about the one you printed and cut out to try that first time.)
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #662 on: February 12, 2013, 07:54:17 pm »
+9

Donald, do you have any pictures of your original version? (I'm talking about the one you printed and cut out to try that first time.)
My plan is that some time after Guilds is spoiled, I will send theory a pile of images of Dominion outtakes. They will not be photos, they will just be the images I print out to make prototypes, probably shrunk so it feels less like anyone would complain about me using an image they own. It will include very early images. If a card changed early on, then I do not have the original; there was no point to saving those images, I just put the new image in the file where the old image was. In fact I may not have any day one images; it's hard to know for sure. Almost everything changed; even Copper didn't have a name originally.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #663 on: February 12, 2013, 08:33:15 pm »
+1

Since you are into Magic, what is your favorite color/color combination?
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #664 on: February 13, 2013, 02:29:47 am »
+2

Since you are into Magic, what is your favorite color/color combination?
Mostly I played limited, and obv. any given environment has different things you get out of the colors. In the old days blue and black got to do the most, followed by green, and that made them the most fun for constructed and casual decks, although it's not like I specifically played blue/black as a result. At the same time red and green were easily the best in limited for years, followed by black. These days they try to balance both power level in constructed/limited and how much fun you get to have with each color. I feel like red still isn't quite there but it's a lot better than it was. Anyway overall maybe black and green; I am a big fan of making tokens and sacrificing creatures. My favorite combo was Chronatog / Final Fortune; it looks like your opponent will get an extra turn, but then they don't.

For years I mostly drafted cubes; I would make a new one each month and we'd play it a bunch. Typically they would have rarities like normal sets - we would shuffle separate piles of commons/uncommons/rares. A classic cube is just a pile of the strongest Magic cards ever; I did that once but my cubes tended to be random themes, whatever I could come up with for a new environment. In later years I would have 20-40 commons that I made to flesh out the theme.

Back when I played casual constructed, my big thing was 3-card challenge decks. You pick 3 cards. You play 3 copies of each. Every other non-land card in your deck has to be a combo with one or more of those three cards., and there are no other duplicates. I also played superdecks, which is where you have a 30-card half-deck for each color plus artifacts with the same theme, and shuffle two together to get a deck.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #665 on: February 13, 2013, 07:19:41 pm »
0

Are there anythings like the above (3-card challenge, cube, etc.) that you recommend for RL Dominion players to try out and have fun with?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #666 on: February 13, 2013, 07:28:20 pm »
+2

Are there anythings like the above (3-card challenge, cube, etc.) that you recommend for RL Dominion players to try out and have fun with?

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #667 on: February 13, 2013, 08:47:39 pm »
+3

Are there anythings like the above (3-card challenge, cube, etc.) that you recommend for RL Dominion players to try out and have fun with?
There are enough cards now that you can make a set of 25 - pick 25 cards, as many as a standalone expansion that doesn't squeeze in a 26th, and then play with that set as if it's a standalone - take 10 cards from it at a time. And you pick a theme and uh you know. I will post some examples later.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #668 on: February 13, 2013, 08:54:45 pm »
+4

What do you feel about Celestial Chameleon breaking Dominion in half? Or indeed the puzzles & challenges in general?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #669 on: February 13, 2013, 09:33:15 pm »
0

Are there anythings like the above (3-card challenge, cube, etc.) that you recommend for RL Dominion players to try out and have fun with?
There are enough cards now that you can make a set of 25 - pick 25 cards, as many as a standalone expansion that doesn't squeeze in a 26th, and then play with that set as if it's a standalone - take 10 cards from it at a time. And you pick a theme and uh you know. I will post some examples later.

That sounds like a lot of fun! Thank you Donald! :] (can't thank you enough for all you've given back to this community ;))
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #670 on: February 14, 2013, 02:18:43 am »
0

What do you feel about Celestial Chameleon breaking Dominion in half? Or indeed the puzzles & challenges in general?
They're fun in moderation. I've read a bunch and tried a few, but don't normally click on that forum these days.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #671 on: February 16, 2013, 12:03:39 am »
0

If you could get Dominion translated into a quirky language (like Klingon, Esperanto, Latin, whatever) just for shits and giggles, which would it be, and why?  Which translation would amuse you the most?
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #672 on: February 16, 2013, 12:14:50 am »
0

If you could get Dominion translated into a quirky language (like Klingon, Esperanto, Latin, whatever) just for shits and giggles, which would it be, and why?  Which translation would amuse you the most?

Latin is quirky?  Or do you mean ig-pay atin-lay? :P
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Donald X.

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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #673 on: February 16, 2013, 12:20:24 am »
0

If you could get Dominion translated into a quirky language (like Klingon, Esperanto, Latin, whatever) just for shits and giggles, which would it be, and why?  Which translation would amuse you the most?
I think we are veering into "which kind of tree would you like to be" territory. It was cool to see Dominion in a bunch of languages, but that's that, I will get no special pleasure from seeing Dominion in any particular additional language.
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Re: Interview with Donald X.
« Reply #674 on: February 16, 2013, 09:20:56 am »
+6

What kind of tree would you like to be?
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