7 Wonders - Tarken
The appeal of Native Village is not that it has a lot of words but that they all communicate a simple idea. By contrast, while I think I know what idea this card is trying to communicate, I don't see how its text arrives at that idea or really makes for a playable experience at all. I don't see why anyone would want to buy this... if you add a card to the wonder deck, and you want to GET that card, you're basically counting on shuffling before anyone else does, which is a hard thing to control unless complemented by specific cards (Messenger, Scavenger, etc.). You can't even use this as a very weak Attack by putting a Curse in the wonder deck, because then somebody else could just trash it for $2.
Agricola - Erick648
This feels more like a Haven variant than an Archive variant, despite the borrowing of some wording, but removing Haven's cantrip nature makes it play very differently. Getting the cards back into your hand on two different turns nicely gets around some of the more powerful possibilities of an into-your-hand duplicator (e.g. Treasure Map, Graverobber), and the fact this can duplicate
anything (except for victory cards) is likewise balanced by the fact this is very slow and takes a long time to get back into your deck after you play it. All in all, this is a perfectly functional and plausible Dominion card whose influence from another game is quite subtle.
Agricola - GreyEK
This is cute, but doing something at the start of each player's turn like this is kind of annoying, especially when the text instructing me to do so is buried in a supply pile instead of on a card in front of me. Landmarks can get away with this because they give me points--Elder I wouldn't have as much incentive to remember.
Agricola - Holunder9
Making this a landscape card instead of part of the supply makes me a bit likelier to remember to add tokens to this one, but this feels a bit too self-contained, and the decision of whether to buy it or not on any given turn doesn't feel very interesting.
Arkham Horror - NoMoreFun
Oddly, I don't think this suffers from being as hard to remember as the last two Agricolas, because the fact it's a Landmark (and one that can end the game!) makes it function better as a looming presence over every turn. I think I'd need a lot of playtesting before I could really say how well this works, though... if taking 3VP is good enough to buy a Curse for, then does that mean that players will simply avoid buying cards that give Curses to
other players? And how likely is it that this would ever actually end the game? It's hard to predict.
Battleship - MrHiTech
This appears to be a slower, less-integrated-into-general-Dominion-rules version of Chariot Race.
Betrayal at House on the Hill - Violet CLM
I can't lie: I think this is elegant. Really I'm surprised more people didn't end up using Heirlooms for things. My main concern is that the result of the high debt cost might be that everyone would wait for one player to buy this, then everyone else would buy it in immediate succession, to ride out the debt at roughly the same speed. I'm also not quite sure what I think about the fact that buying Estates
before the Project, to make it cheaper, then gives you fewer chances to score lots of cheap VP
afterwards.
Bohnanza - hypercube
Everything about this is stylish, matching the bean colors to the card colors in particular. Wax Bean is a great $2, usually less useful than Silver but just exciting enough to capture people's attention. My main points of concern are Blue Bean and Cocoa Bean... if you only play Coco Bean once, it's a Prince, and between the first and last times you play it, one or more Action cards you like have been removed from your deck. I'm not sure that's significantly more powerful than Teacher or Champion, but Blue Bean is so hard to exchange that getting Cocoa Bean should probably be slower than either of those canonical Traveller line enders. I guess that's the reason the lower Beans focus more on high numbers than on exchanging? On that note, kudos to Black-Eyed Bean for seamlessly giving you a source of useful action cards to use Cocoa Bean on, even if you'd spent the rest of the game only buying Wax Beans.
Broom Service - Fragasnap
I haven't played Broom Service, but this card reminds me of Basari, so I guess I can relate to it anyway. My suspicion is that this is so expensive there won't be a lot of copies in circulation at any given time, significantly reducing the chance of the gain failing to happen. Turn order has weird effects on this one too, like if player 3's card is revealed on player 1's turn, then player 2 can put down that same card in order to sabotage player 3's turn.
Carcassonne - spiralstaircase
A mini-expansion is not quite what I had in mind for allowing multiple card-shaped objects to express a concept, so I'm not sure whether to talk about each card individually or focus on what they have in common. In general I'm worried these are a little too focused on concept and not quite focused enough on execution. Cloister's eight card trigger isn't justified by the card's function itself, for example, only by its Carcassonne equivalent, and I am baffled by the $6 threshold on City Walls, which outside of Bank is basically never going to happen. I like Field as a sort of roll-your-own Landmark, and Road is probably quite strong in the right kingdom, but mostly I think these look very exciting but aren't quite ready.
Castell - scott_pilgrim
I think I'd rather see this concept as a Landmark, in the classic three-2VP-tokens-per-player vein. Otherwise I don't know... this is the kind of unexciting, sometimes-really-useful card that lots of games need, but is that really the right stuff for a $6? In general I'd rather have two Conspirators.
Chess - silvern
Should be a traveller.
Chutes and Ladders - MrHiTech
A collection of pretty ordinary fan card ideas, though structuring a split pile in a way other than AAAAABBBBB is an interesting idea. I suspect it would take some work while playing with these to determine how useful these are and how to optimize them.
Coup - Violet CLM
This is transparently an idea from another game clumsily transplanted into Dominion. It fails to preserve the reason that idea worked in its original context, and fails to integrate that idea with any other parts of Dominion in its new context.
Dungeons and Dragons - Doom_Shark
I kind of like the idea of a card that becomes much less useful if you draw it late in your turn, but +2 Actions is pretty weak, and in general I think this compares unfavorably with other VP-gaining actions.
Dungeons and Dragons - MrHiTech
The effects of playing this have been discussed pretty much exhaustively already, but I'll add that the dice don't feel like a very Dominion game mechanic to me. A small stack of cards with different effects, like Boons, would be more plausible.
Glory to Rome - Watno
The core idea here is sound, though considering how hard it would be to pull this off more than once (multiple Provinces and a specific other card in your hand), it may not need to be $6. Or maybe it could search your discard pile? This is somewhere between a Project and Royal Carriage, and that's not a bad place to be. The name needs changing now, of course.
Guess Who? - King Leon
An excellent candidate for silver-bordered Dominion, but possibly too strong and definitely too slow.
Isle of Skye - 4est
"Anyway, the idea definitely needs tweaking, but here's a stab at it," ends this post, and between that and the ensuing discussion I'm not sure what I can add. I'm also not sure from the wording whether the loop has a break instruction, or whether it's possible for
every other player but you to end up gaining a copy of the card. Still, with enough tweaking I bet this could be a very cool Dominion card.
Life - MrHiTech
Hey, it's the Fairy from everybody's favorite Carcassonne expansion. This feels like kind of the simplest possible form of the Artifact idea--despite apparently being a State--and that helps drive home for me that I'm not especially into Artifacts. Some more variability needs to be injected into this idea
somewhere.
Lifeboat - Aquila
Anything like this occupies an odd in-between realm where it has to have enough effect to be worth including in the game but not so much effect that it ruins all the player's plans. Tentatively I'd say this works, though like Boons, I'm sure it's not something people would want to deal with in
super serious matches. Being able to see next turn's weather effect in advance is probably not usually too useful, but it could surely combine with some specific cards in interesting ways.
Monopoly - Tejayes
I'm assuming "discard this" at the bottom of this card is meant to negate the top part's effect, though in light of e.g. Procession+Duration I don't think that's strictly correct? Overall this is a pretty cool card, although I'd leave out "trash a Silver," because it's needlessly specific and also doesn't really seem to belong with the rest of the text. Also trying to define "end your turn" is probably too complicated an endeavor for a single card. But there's definitely a strong concept in here that could use a bit more fleshing out.
Netrunner - artless
This post didn't get a lot of response, but I like all these cards, even if to work better as challenge entries they should really interact with each other somehow. Hired Blade doesn't really do enough to distinguish itself from Witch probably? But the other two are good if you like your token-based gameplay.
Orleans - Nflickner
At max, this is $20 for 15VP... by comparison, buying five duchies would cost $25, and you'd also be saddled with them weighing down your deck. Plus, by itself the VP->$ trade isn't the best deal in history, but I would totally pay 1VP to turn $7 into $8. (Though I don't see any reason to invoke coffers at all, as compared to just +$1.) Unless it's too strong, this looks like a fine addition to a kingdom.
Pandemic - faust
This card takes some thought, but I think I'm mostly sold on it. Players are well motivated to buy this early to trash their Coppers/Estates, then at some point it starts being useful if they wind up with some Curses from not being able to play the card often enough to clear the way for their purchases. The only part that really bothers me is the "[w]hen any player shuffles their deck" trigger, which feels too variable and too vaguely defined.
Power Grid - Asper
There sure are a lot of cards caring about Provinces in this challenge. Power Grid is not my favorite game, but I think these card-shaped objects make good use of the concept in question, and tying the auction to an event that happens only rarely makes it less of a slog. It's a pity Dominion has no way of keeping track of people's scores, to give the underdogs a bit of an advantage in these auctions, but clockwise order is random enough I suppose. Really there's nothing to complain about here, a single concept well expressed without hitting any obvious traps.
Settlers of Catan - terminalCopper
Obviously these are all translations of development cards, but I still can't escape the feeling there are two separate concepts at play here: the Catanians/Handicaps, and everything else. And even the latter category is two concepts, powerful Reserve cards that may only be called once each and cards that are bought (and kept) face-down. As is, this post is trying too hard to incorporate
everything about Settlers' development cards, but fleshing out some of the individual ideas might well be a fruitful endeavor.
Sheriff of Nottingham - Commodore Chuckles
Some of the wording here confuses me... "for each player you chose" suggests you can choose more than one player, but the preceding text does not. Can you choose the same player 46 times in a row to empty the Copper pile as part of ending the game? Even if not, this becomes a little too automatic the moment you hit a situation where gaining Copper is good for whatever reason. I wonder how many situations there are where being able to manually reveal another player's hand is beneficial... Gladiator, of course, maybe something else? But those are all edge cases, and mostly I think this is a nice card. It's probably okay to have one or two, which you'll want considering how strong the on-play effect is, but if you try to
rely on this card then your opponent/s will cut you down.
Star Realms - Chappy7
I'm not totally sold on Reconstruct, whose range of options (most of them unrelated to the top half) confuses me, but Trebuchet looks like a good, straightforward combination of Militia and Farmers' Market. Maybe a little too slow, though indeed 3+ player games would interact with that.
Stratego - terminalCopper
Even putting aside the issue that these should really be Action -
Attack - Traveller, these cards just don't look very useful to me. You can't really assume the kingdom will have a lot of other traveller chains in it, and if not, these cards just don't strike me as powerful enough for me to want to buy some of my own to (occasionally) manage to make you discard yours.
Takenoko - Kudasai
I mentioned earlier that I'm learning I'm not too enthused by Artifacts, but the same cannot be said for Empires-style cards, and this is
very Empires, even if the tokens in question are coins instead of VPs. Panda might be too expensive at $4, but I could definitely be convinced otherwise... otherwise, everything here looks like it'd be a lot of fun to play with. Extra points for Gardener providing a reason to put tokens on a supply pile that nobody (otherwise) wants to buy cards from.
Temporum - crlundy
Another from the Empires school of design, this is an easy enough Event to understand, but I'm not immediately convinced it would be the most fun thing to play with. This might be incentivizing specialization a little too much, and the player interaction could get nasty.
Terraforming Mars - Violet CLM
Issues with this one have been pointed out in another reply. A bonus for
early Provinces is not a bad idea--see Tournament--but making the rest of the game less interesting is probably not the way to accomplish that.
Tichu - singletee
Like the Carcassonne and Netrunner entries, this is a series of separate supply piles, none of which are guaranteed to show up in the same kingdoms as one another. So that's a bit dubious. These are generally fine cards of varying memorability (though Loyal Companion looks weak to me on first blush), but I can't escape the feeling they're a little too narrowly focused on specific cards from within Tichu without much acknowledgment of the role they play in Tichu's broader rules. For sure some of the entries have flown a bit too close to the sun in trying to incorporate into Dominion rules from other games entirely, but these are too close to the ground.
Ticket to Ride - Fly-Eagles-Fly
First, a suggestion: using letters instead of numbers to specify each supply pile should avoid potential confusion with costs or the implication that the piles are being ordered. I don't see where the 19 number comes from... normally there should be 15 (ten + silver + gold + estate + duchy + province), and the odd cases with more piles (bane, colony/platinum) are probably not worth making a fuss over. Better to have no tickets reward you for buying Platinums than to have to begin each game by sorting out all the tickets that include numbers >= 16. Hopefully even after that there wouldn't be the full 15 choose 2 (=105) tickets, randomizing the number to supply pile assignment should mean having some gaps is harmless. Anyway, putting aside the issue you bring up of how to ensure players are able to gain two cards in a turn, I worry this might give people too many points without much to limit them besides running out of three piles. Why should I buy a Province when I could get 6VP buying a Village and a Woodcutter instead?
Tzolk'in - Violet CLM
Probably functional, but it manages to lose a lot of the point of Tzolk'in in the implementation. Tzolk'in is all about looking several turns into the future to set up effects; here you can try to do that, but you're still at the mercy of Dominion's deck shuffling and random card drawing. You can't even adjust the cost of the card you get from this the same turn you gain that card, so if you've spent the last many turns aiming for a Prince, and suddenly you draw a hand of all green and yellow, well, too bad.
Judging Dominion cards is an inherently subjective endeavor, all the more so when the standards for judgment were not well established. Some entries were too close to ordinary cards with no influence from other games--other entries were too close to their original games with only a token attempt to be Dominion cards. But I couldn't give you an objective way of measuring that, nor a promise that I was entirely consistent in my reactions to any given point on that scale. Some other entries were also unfairly negatively affected by relying on very precise numbers for their prices or effects, which playtesting could reveal to be exactly right or too high or too low, but which my intuitions were insufficient to fully gauge. Obviously, despite my concerns about this or that point on this or that card, I was really excited to read
all these entries and I would enjoy trying out many of them. Still, I have to pick out two that best captured that delicate, poorly-defined balance between being good Dominion objects but also good references...
Runner up:
Takenoko - Kudasai
Winner:
Power Grid - Asper
