Dominion in a Smaller Form Factor

Introduction

It's time for another one of Tom's crazy arts and crafts projects. This takes another look at Dominion, a game I've tried to work out my own storage solutions for, as addressed in previous posts.

This time though I want a different discussion about Dominion. Over time I've noticed it's harder to get people interested in playing this game. There are many reasons for this:

For one, the game looks pretty boring, and overall consensus is that this game is pretty much theme-less. The bland conventional style doesn't really hold up against other games on a shelf at a Barnes & Noble. I fully admit it took me years to buy Dominion (which came out around 2009), and a big part of it was that it was the incredibly uninteresting box. Dramatic games, like King of Tokyo or Smash Up are much easier sell, for instance.

Would you like Giant Monsters Battling, Dinosaurs with Lasers,
or Rolling Fields of Quiet Tranquility?

The second reason was that I heard it compared as a step above Collectible Card Games, or CCGs (the most famous example being Magic: The Gathering). In fact, the game's designer Donald X. Vaccarino expressed that his appreciation for Magic influenced him for this game. As an off-again-on-again Magic player over the years, I avoided the game somewhat because of that comparison, because "inspired by a CCG" doesn't seem like a good selling point to me. The "money pit" aspect of Magic is a pretty large deterrent for me.

When I went on vacation to the Pacific Northwest this year, I stumbled on a different game that I really enjoyed called Nefarious, that I discovered was also by Vaccarino. Also, a friend of mine raved about Dominion while I was out there, so I chose to bite the bullet and try it out.

The third reason Dominion is a hard sell is because it's kinda unwieldy. If you stuffed them into a 250-card paper box you'd probably do ok, but then you'd have what looks like a card game in a paper box. See reason #1 again - presentation really helps. When I've carried my storage solutions for Dominion around I've felt eyes on me with the same flat stare of the guy selling "real Rolexes" on the street corner with his overcoat.

I've really been relying on these posts to be a partial selling point for Dominion, because unless I start making Dominion X-TREME (The Smithy picture [tentatively!] will have Thor and a Laser Anvil for instance), this game will only really spread by word of mouth.

The third point is what leads me to the main part of this post. I want people to get interested in this game, but I can't lug around huge boxes of cards with me all the time. So what can I do about this?

A Matter of Scale

One of the things that dawned on me when I started thinking about this problem is that Dominion cards were - somewhat unnecessarily - the size of playing cards. Though these cards get filled with card descriptions and artwork, you really don't need any of it outside of the name. So my first thought was to split the size of the cards in half. Conceptually this would also help with carrying all these cards around since it would halve everything, including size and weight.

Permanent marker on a blank Bicycle playing card can get a lot
of detail - more than enough for half a card.

I've gotten packs of blank faced Bicycle cards through Amazon on occasion (recently I purchased some blank decks to make a personal version of Hanabi since I couldn't find the game through retail outlets), so testing this scaling adjustment seemed to be pretty easy. I split some extra cards in half to see how they'd be. (I recommend a paper cutter for doing this instead of scissors - your hands will thank you)

Since each blank set was 56 cards, splitting the cards in half made it 112 (with no room for error). The base set of Dominion supports 2-4 players, and minimally requires 254 (3x8 minimum victory cards, 10x10 supply cards, and 60+40+30 treasure cards), so I had to reduce the set to 224 to keep the cards manageable and not hack up a third set of cards. I worked around this by restricting this solution to 2 players and then removing 10 of each treasure card type, since if you're going through any of those supplies in a 2-player game you're doing it wrong.

The Progression of building Victory Points

All cards were they drawn using permanent marker, and I think they look pretty ok. I didn't want to be intricate with drawing these cards for a few reasons:

1. This is only meant to be a portable learning set, not a replacement for the game.
2. There was no room for error; I didn't want to waste any cards.
3. Tediousness; even only for two players I was still applying permanent marker to 224 cards.
4. I already own the cards, so why would I want to make a pretty set when I could use what I own?

In the end I got through drawing everything over 2 nights, and several hours per night. I don't recommend doing this unless you're a patient person with stuff like this.

Conclusion

You can see the end product in a little Instagram video here: http://instagram.com/p/dTa9zbpZFw/. It'll fit in two back jean pockets easily and play for 2 players without being unreasonably tiny. Cost would minimally be about $10 if you have the markers already, and probably about 8 hours of patience.

"Dominion Pocket" : Includes the Base Set Recommended
Starting Supply and resources for a 2-Player game. No rules,
but that's why there's the Internet. [Instagram]

One of the main reasons I give myself these little projects is that it helps me think about the products I purchase, and their construction. I think it's similar to carpenters eyeing IKEA furniture as a baseline for their own personal projects, and maybe I'd do that to if I had the tools and the space (one of the downsides to apartment life, though if TechShop was closer than Pittsburgh these posts would be about tables instead of table games).

In any case, this was a little different from previous Dominion posts, more in line with my posts about reconstructing games than storing them. Hope it was at least a little interesting to you. If not, I'm sure we can all look forward to Dominion X-TREME in the near future.

Hanabi

Introduction

This year's Spiel des Jahres winner is a game called Hanabi. It's a cooperative card game, where the players are working on creating a fireworks display using a hand of cards exposed to all players but the owner. You hold your hand of cards backwards the entire game, so other players tell you the types of cards in your hand. There was a gameplay for it made available (along with the other Spiel des Jahres nominees) through the BoardGameGeekTV channel on YouTube. It's a little long, but the gameplay is the first 12 minutes, and it's a great example game to watch.

I really appreciated the game mechanics, and I went to a local game store to see if they had it. They sadly did not, and a couple websites I checked also didn't have the game available to order (as of this writing). So over the evening I took it on myself to make my own version. I had purchased a couple blank decks of Bicycle Cards through Amazon a few months ago, and this deck sounded simple enough to make.

Making a Deck

5 Permanent Markers and a $4 pack of blank playing cards.

I stuck with the 5 colors of the original game, and I tried to stick with the fireworks theme as much as permanent markers can allow (granted the green fireworks look like palm trees, but whatever).

Examples of the 5 colors.

Writing the numbers took maybe 15 minutes with drying time. The additional firework drawings added some more time, though that was more because I could use more of the permanent marker colors I had beyond the 5.

The cards mostly completed.

 In the rules I also read there are additional cards for a more difficult variant - where these five cards count as every color. The Bicycle blanks had 56 cards total, so I used five for the muilticolored cards. The last will probably include the scoring notes (for instance, 0-5: Horrible ... 25: Legendary).

Multicolored cards for the "Avalanche of Colors" variant.

Conclusion

In the end I'm pretty happy with the results - for not doing a whole lot of work. And I get to play the winner of the Spiel des Jahres now instead of trying to dig around for something. I'll probably get the real game eventually, but in the meantime crafting my own version will get me playing a good new game when it becomes scarce.

[Instagram Video]