DominionStrategy Wiki
Also, is there a website from which people are getting their dominion-looking pictures to use on their cards? Or are people literally just making them and finding them randomly on the internet?
Here are some classic tricks.- Look at all of your data, and see what triggers and effects it produces, then pair them up.- Look at all of your rules, and see which ones you can make exceptions to.- Consider different basic forms of program flow and what they get you.- Look at what you've got so far; see what will work with it.- Categorize what you've got so far; see what holes there are that you can try cards for.- Look for classic variations on what you have so far; especially, little, big, and lots.- Flavor can inspire new ideas.- Look at your other games, see what ideas from there will port over.- Look at the world through the lens of rules on cards. Any random time when you have an idea, write it down.- Look at what didn't work in the past that maybe now you can fix up.- When you've got 15 expansions, you really want a strong direction to help you get going. You've got a mechanic to try and you put it through its paces.Here are some examples of those.- You have $, you have cards in hand; we could let you somehow make $ based on the cards. We can say discard them (Vault), or count them in reverse (Souk).- The rules have phases going in a particular order. We can mess with the order (Villa); we can add a phase (Night).- There are so many very basic program flow things. We can give you a choice of costs (Animal Fair), choice of effects (Pawn), just do multiple things (Jack of All Trades), do some things now and some things later (Durations). You can do loops, e.g. repeat-until (Library).- Let's see there are a bunch of Villages, maybe something can interact with those (Diadem).- At one point I looked at all the basic pairings of resources, what had I not done yet that was worth doing. Not for e.g. Bazaar and Worker's Village, which had just been saved for later. I don't remember if I got a specific card this way.- Hamlet is a little village, Bustling Village is a big one, Port is two villages.- Siren is an example of a card that started with flavor. What would a Siren do?- I'd had Durations in games for years; Greed for example is from 2003, though it was published after Dominion, and has a few Durations. An idea from Rising Sun ultimately goes back to Nefarious.- I do write down ideas whenever I have them. I'm looking at a notebook page from work on Adventures; the first thing is the VP card that turned into Wall.- Horn of Plenty is an example I've talked at length about where the original card ("+$1 per Action you played this turn") failed (turning into Conspirator at the time) but I remembered it and worked on it more.- Plunder had multiple themes from the start, it had Treasure - Durations and next-time Durations and Loot all on day one. So I could get right to looking at, what could I do with these mechanics.Of course there are other ways to get card ideas too. Village for example, the idea was to limit Action plays specifically so I could make that card. Cards needed things to do.