How do you come up with cards?
Lots of ways. When I'm making a new game, there's all the basic stuff to do, I do all that stuff (at least at first). I make cards that interact with all of the things that are special about the game, since those cards won't feel like I've done them a million times. You know, you have say a deck of cards, and can have "draw 3 cards;" that comes up in game after game. But +1 Buy, that's very specific to the rules for Dominion, so that feels more new. I don't shy away from the good basic things that you can always do though, I do some of them. I just try to lean towards what makes this game different.
Once I have a bunch of cards, to make new ones, I look for what I haven't done yet, I try to explore themes more deeply.
Sometimes I make top-down cards (flavor first); not so much in most games though. Sometimes the flavor is first but I just pair up flavor and functionality from separate lists. Generally I don't have "complexity points" to spend on "trinket text" (you people who read Blogatog know these terms). Sometimes I go for it though.
Cards are like little computer programs. You can approach them from this perspective; you consider basic kinds of program flow. I could have an if/else card, a repeat/until card.
And of course I've made tons of games, so I've been over this ground a lot, so I know some of the things I will think of, and can just jump to those things.
You have said that you always think fan cards are unbalanced or boring, but have you seen any that are good?
What I said was, that if I sit down and read a bunch of fan cards, I don't expect to find new worthwhile ideas. Here let's have a quote, people love this one.
I don't usually look at them, because 1) I don't want people feeling like I'm taking their ideas, which probably I had years ago, not because I am amazing but because the obvious ideas are obvious and I had a big head start; and 2) the cards that aren't in sets already are usually awful, nonstop things I wouldn't do that are boring and redundant or else obviously bad for the game in some way, and if it's not obvious then I already tried them and found out the hard way. At best they are things I'm already doing; none of it is good reading.
That's not me saying that they're always awful, it's me saying that I don't read them because they're usually awful. It's not good enough entertainment wading through them to try to find good ones. And I don't want to find good ones; I don't want someone thinking I stole their idea, even though their idea, like all of mine, is nowhere near as hard to think of as say calculus, which two guys thought of.
In the post I'm quoting there I cite a fan card I liked. It's on page two of this thread.
How has the Dominion community (not DominionStrategy in particular) contributed to Dominion?
DominionStrategy in particular has not contributed much to the published sets. theory suggested the name Counterfeit (although I had used that name on other earlier cards). But uh there was no time, the site isn't old enough relative to the expansions.
The biggest thing the Dominion community, mostly meaning BGG, which did include some of the people here before they came here, has contributed to is my understanding of what cards players will like or not. I found out that "attacks that just attack" would be hated, so I didn't do more of them (I snuck in Sir Michael). I found out that complexity was even more of an issue than I'd thought, that flipping over good cards to things like Loan was not enjoyed, that Tribute feels like an attack. I found out that people always really wanted more reactions / treasures / VP cards, and didn't so much like attacks. The game needed to be a little more interactive (for people who don't get much from the built-in interaction) while being less attacky. The German community (
http://forum.dominionblog.de/) compiled a big list of translation errors that I expect to be fixed in the new German versions.
From sales and the community it seems like players would rather all sets were large. If there's ever another set, I will try to make it large. They were all large originally. HiG wanted like 5-card sets and the lowest I would go was 12 (I wanted it to be that when you mixed a bunch of random sets, you didn't have the special villageless mix or whatever).
The Dominion community including this site has contributed to online Dominion; wanting stuff, complaining about stuff.
How do you come up with card names.
Mostly there is no special trick, I use brain stuff. Sometimes I use a thesaurus, and at one point I got a list of medieval professions. Sometimes other people help.
And finally, what was with that blue dog comment? It sure didn't make any sense to me...
The text on Ironworks is not as precise as say a computer program. There was a question as to what it was really saying, and to try to explain it I tried to use similar words to say other things. The dog is blue so that it's been qualified in some way. As it happens I blew it and didn't notice that an "a" was "the" or vice-versa, I'm not checking. Anyway it all worked out and now we know what happens when you Ironworks a card and then use Trader to take Silver instead.
