I would be interested in the design of the very first ten dominion cards (the cards you used in your first game). Do you have any pictures of the cards or do you have any similar files?
I didn't keep the very first cards; what were the odds anyone would ever want to see those. They roughly looked like:
- Village, $5, +2 Actions
- Market, $5, +1 Buy
- Witch, $3, Each other player gains a Curse
- either Knight, ~$6, each other player trashes their top card, or Thief, ~$1, each other player discards 1-2 cards
- Moat, $2, play to stop an attack
- Chapel, $2, trash any number of cards from your hand
- either Library, $4, draw an extra 2 cards at end of turn, or Lab, same but discard 2 afterwards
- Mine, $5, turn Copper to Silver or Silver to Gold, rather than working on any treasure
- Tower, $2, +1 card +1 action +$1
- possibly Remodel or Cellar or Throne Room
I know there were two attacks plus Moat. I'm sure about Village and Market and Tower. I know the card-drawing was something weak, I was initially scared of card-drawing.
Images of the oldest surviving pics are in the outtakes article, skipping ones that would just have the same text as the final version. I didn't save Village etc., I edited the images as I tweaked the cards. When I cut a card, I put a new card in its slot; I didn't immediately start saving outtakes. So Dungeon is the first image in the oldest file, but it wasn't in the first game, whatever was there didn't last.
Over the course of the evening, we played with the cards at different costs, marking the piles with dice. I printed out new versions for next game night, plus ten new cards, which I know included two attacks (including $3, +1 card, each other player gains a Confusion), Battlements (reaction that draws you cards), and whatever ones from above weren't actually in the first ten. Probably also Vault ($4, victory cards are Copper this turn) and Dungeon ($3, discard a card from your hand, trash a card from your hand, draw 3 cards). Possibly Feast (+$3, trash this) or Trading Post (trash a card from your hand to gain a card with the same cost). Possibly the VP Tower ($4, 1 VP per 3 Actions).
You can only play one action per turn, buy one card per turn. It's fair to say that those rules went hand-in-hand with having cards that were exceptions; part of the beauty of the rules is that then you can break them. Replacing cards with other cards directly was an obvious way to build up separately from buying things. Attacks obviously were going to give out junk, trash cards, cause discarding (Spy came a lot later); whatever one wasn't there the first night, it just didn't make it into the first ten, it was on the schedule. Reactions were part of the premise, although as cards you played at a special time, rather than the reveal thing that made it out. You could get rid of cards and there was something you obviously wanted to get rid of, so I immediately had Chapel. It took a bit longer to get Workshop. You could draw more cards, but maybe drawing your deck would be too easy, so at first it was harder to draw cards. The idea to Tower was to give you a little of multiple things, I was not thinking of it as chaining until I saw it in action. Cellar was obvious from the start but initially didn't have +1 Action. And then Throne Room, that's something automatically possible in many games without having much you've decided on. You play cards; you could play the same card twice.
The chaining Tower was fun, and over the first few weeks I came around on card-drawing and action-chaining. Village needed to draw a card to increase your chance of having extra actions to play; Market had to give you $ to increase the chance you could really buy two things. Once I had chaining +actions and +$/buy, I added Lab as we know it. At the same time I got less scared of card-drawing and put in Smithy. And then I made more complex cards.