Not sure if this has been asked earlier (this thread is quite long): The Intrigue rules offer a way to play up to 6-player Dominion, but caution against it because of the downtime between turns, and the base game already recognized that things should change slightly depending on number of players, i.e. 8-card Victory piles for 2 players. Did you originally envision Dominion primarily as a game for a table full of players, or did you see the 2-player/competitive scene coming?
At the very beginning, I make the game and see what happens. I am hoping for a wide range of players but it will vary based on the game. I am most interested in a game working with 3-5 players, because I will have 3+ players, and there are issues as you add players that are likely to nix 6+ (components, downtime).
It was immediately clear that Dominion worked with 2-5, and obv. there's more downtime with more players. Ideally many things scale well, but where something was going to vary depending on the number of players, I aimed for 3 players, to get it to be as good as possible with 2-4; effects don't tend to have funny curves here (you don't for example find things that are strong with 2, weak with 3, strong again with 4), so that's how you do it. And if you want to play with 5, okay. I never would have supported 6; any game company would have automatically supported 6. I worried about cards that change with the player count, such as Thief or Gardens. I tried to be happy with them for 2-4.
The first few games were with 4 players, but I was playing it with 2 and 3 also very soon after that. I didn't immediately vary the size of victory piles for 2, that came later; we just played longer 2-player games.
I have always envisioned it as a multiplayer game, but it is no surprise that competitive people on the internet prefer to play with 2. It reduces luck and downtime. But like, for the endless online testing we did, while there was some 2-player testing, often we waited for a third. And some people would just refuse to play with 5.
Also along the lines of variations, did you think people would mostly design their own kingdoms, or play random ones, like Goko's pro mode?
I thought people would mostly play with random cards, from all the sets they had. I did not foresee the popularity of the recommended sets of 10.
How did those expectations affect playtesting, if at all? Did you play about the same amount of games with each variant, or weigh towards what you thought would be most commonly played?
We tested the recommended sets for later sets; for earlier sets, they got played maybe once each. I figured, random works, these 10 will work.
IRL I mostly played with just two sets, five cards from each (sometimes 6-4 or 7-3 for a small set). This is practical; I was lugging boxes of cards to the place of gaming. Online we mostly played pure random, except when forcing a card or cards for focused testing.
I have for funsies played specific silly themed games. And the sets IRL have looked fairly different and I've played all the various forms.
Last question: If the common variants did turn out different from what you expected, are there any cards that you look back on and think, "Maybe this card would be different if I had known which way people were mostly going to play this game?"
I'm not sure I understand this one. If hypothetically everyone mostly wanted to play recommended sets of 10, I would have included more of them. I upped how many there were for later sets, but then got lazy for Guilds. If everyone only played with two players then it would have been better to shift certain cards towards being maximally balanced there, but it's not like it's far off as is.
