Imagine you are playing Dominion. Last round, you finally had enough money in hand, so you took a Province from the supply and put it into your discard pile. That was real points, and the kingdom grew one step larger.
A few rounds later, it comes back into your hand.
The green card face is beautiful, but what you need right now is money, card draw, actions that can connect your next step. The card that just symbolized success is now quietly occupying a slot. You start calculating: was it too early? If I had bought another card first, would the next round be better?
This card that suddenly became clumsy brings Donald X. Vaccarino's most interesting design question right in front of us: if the burden brought by growth must also be carried by yourself, what would this kingdom become?
His answer was not drawn on a vast map, but packed into a deck that is constantly being shuffled.
1. Before the publication date, there is still an invisible period of creation
When Dominion was published in 2008, many people saw Donald X. Vaccarino's name on the box for the first time. Looking back only from a publication catalog, he seems to have suddenly appeared there.
But in a 2012 interview with The Opinionated Gamers, he specifically corrected this impression: he had been seriously designing games since 1995, but only truly pushed works toward publication in 2007; in between, he had shown designs to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.
From 1995 to 2007 is twelve years. What players saw was a box of a game finally appearing on the shelf, but what the designer experienced was many attempts that still had no cover and no publication date. The first publicly visible boxed work was just a door finally pushed open outward from this creative life.
In another interview with himself, he recalled that the influence of Magic: The Gathering was not just a fun game. The rules on the cards could interact with each other, which fascinated him; the friends he played with also led him toward German board games.
Here two kinds of experience met. One made a single card into a local rule, producing unexpected combinations when they collided with each other; the other let an evening come into contact with different decision structures through different games.
The local rules on the cards and the compact, changing decisions on the table thus entered his creative life. The person who later packed a world into a deck was already slowly accumulating his own questions among these different games.
He had seen how rules could hide on card faces, and he long had a play environment willing to put new things on the table. Creation is first of all not a monologue declaring a manifesto, but something being made and then actually picked up by someone who tries to use it.
Years later, people would bind his name tightly to one mechanism. But in the first half of this story, what is more worth seeing is that he first accumulated many works before he met the game that made him seriously move toward publication.
2. Remove the adventure from a large adventure, leaving only the one thing you most want to do
In The Secret History of Dominion, written by Vaccarino himself, he explained an important creative background: at the time he was working on Spirit Warriors II, a very large card adventure design.
The idea of deck building emerged during this process. By a weekend in October 2006, he decided to first make a simpler work and let players focus only on doing this thing.
What finally remained at the core of the prototype was a very crisp agreement: resources, actions, and victory points all enter the deck. He also explained that putting scores into the deck came first from the appeal of this overall concept, not from first finding a problem in 'scores will hinder operation' and then reverse-engineering the game.
This self-account preserves a bit of real twists and turns in the creative process. Seeing the finished product now, it is easy to explain every result as a goal the designer had precisely calculated from the beginning. In actual work, a formal preference may also appear first; its meaning only becomes clear through play.
Removing an adventure does not mean removing imagination.
On the contrary, when the deck itself becomes the object of change, players gain a particularly tight feedback: what you buy now will later return to your hand. You cannot see the exact time it will next appear, but you know it will participate in shaping later turns.
A card therefore belongs to two moments at once. Buying it is the choice of the present; drawing it is the future's answer to that choice.
I think the most fascinating part of Dominion lies in this folding of time. In a very short game, players can feel a system go from rough to smooth, and then become clumsy again because of chasing goals. The story is not deleted; it merely shifts from adventure text into a loop you create with your own hands.
You will not forget a certain stuck turn, because you remember that the cards in it were exactly the ones you picked to put in a few minutes earlier.
3. When friends refuse to switch games: how a prototype found its weight
According to Vaccarino's recollection in an interview with Dominion Strategy, the first play of Dominion was on October 30, 2006. He sent an email to Rio Grande Games on January 22, 2007.
Between these two dates, there was not a blank space after one test followed by an immediate declaration of success.
He recalled that the new prototype gradually took over the original board game gatherings and also entered gatherings that originally played Magic: The Gathering. Later, when he made other new games, friends still wanted to keep playing Dominion. After some time, he became increasingly clear that this work was worth seriously trying to publish.
This is not a sales myth, but feedback very close to the daily reality of creation. You bring out something new and others are willing to sit down, which of course makes you happy; but when others already know the rules and have played several times and are still willing to continue, that provides another layer of information.
After the novelty passes, what else is inside?
One answer from Dominion is that the same basic flow can face different supply combinations. Players do not need to prepare a private card pool at home first; instead, under the shared conditions of this game, they gradually change their own decks.
So a habit that worked very well last game may not be directly copied this game. The familiar basic actions are not lost, but you have to reread the opportunities in front of you. Experience can help you, and it can also hold you back when you conclude too quickly.
This change does not require every player to pursue complex combos. Sometimes a simple purchase is powerful enough; sometimes a system you carefully prepared takes a long time before it begins to pay off. What matters is that the route must be judged by putting it back into the cards of this game and the rhythm of the opponents.
It gives a rather special sense of fairness: the possibilities on the table are seen by everyone together, yet each person's method of bringing those possibilities back into their own deck is different. The difference is not an identity written before the start, but something that grows out of choice after choice.
Of course, knowing that everyone faces the same set of cards does not mean you can clearly see the answer. And precisely because of this, friends have reason, after finishing one game, to lay out another set of cards.
4. Put success into the deck, and shuffle the cost in with it
In the basic rules, players start with seven Coppers and three Estates. Purchased cards usually go first into the discard pile, and then, as the deck is reshuffled, become hand cards that can be drawn in the future.
This process gives growth a tangible weight. At the beginning, there is very little you can do on many turns; gradually, cards begin to support each other, and you can accomplish more within one hand.
But victory point cards also occupy deck space. Taking the basic Estate, Duchy, and Province as examples, they have value when scored, but usually do not help this turn operate the way Treasures and Action cards do.
Reading this, the opening dilemma returns: score now, or first improve the ability to score later?
There is no standard moment detached from the situation. If you only polish the system beautifully, the opponent may already have taken the key points; if you take in too many points too early, you may draw a hand of silent green exactly when you most need actions.
I like this restraint. The game allows us to enjoy expansion, but does not automatically write 'more' as 'better.' You must distinguish how much you own from whether these things can work together when needed.
The value of removing weak cards is therefore greater than it seems at first play. Throwing away a card that was once useful is not denying its past contribution, but acknowledging that the stage the system is in has changed.
From the player experience, this is very much like a miniature tidying: every purchase imagines what kind of turn you will want to have in the future, and every deletion acknowledges that the space in front of you is limited. Draw probability gives this tidying a particularly honest feedback: the deck will not become smooth because of your wishes; it will hand your past choices back to you again and again.
The designer makes victory and operation rub against each other, so players need to choose their own rhythm. That deck therefore is no longer just a list of abilities, but a record that keeps turning back to earlier pages and reminding you of what you once did.
5. You do not have to make another deck builder forever: put down your own signature too
If the story ended here, Vaccarino could easily be written as a designer who only keeps expanding decks. But Kingdom Builder offers another interesting turn.
He said in an interview that this work was originally meant to be Dominion with a board: use a deck to place pieces, and then gain cards through the pieces. Later, he realized the deck part could be removed, so he let building on the board become the core directly.
For someone already famous for deck building, this deletion is especially worth noting. Letting a mechanism remain should not be only because it is your signature, but because of what it actually bears in the new work.
In the finished Kingdom Builder, players place settlements according to terrain, usually needing to be adjacent to existing settlements as much as possible; the scoring goals drawn for the game then change which layouts are worth pursuing. The same basic building action becomes different spatial problems under different goals and boards.
If compared by experience, Dominion makes you care about what you will draw back in the future, while Kingdom Builder makes you see how pieces already placed constrain the road ahead. One keeps reshuffling, one leaves traces on the board. Both let earlier choices continue to participate in later choices.
Then look at Infiltration, published by Fantasy Flight Games. Players go deep into a corporate facility to steal data, and the deeper they go, the farther they are from evacuation; it makes the pull between greed and timely exit another kind of felt time pressure.
These three works do not need to be forced into one unified formula. What we can see in common is that he is willing to put a question in a clear enough position: how much to take, how to make it operate, and when to stop.
More interestingly, when he talks about finding ideas, he does not treat inspiration as a gift one can only wait for. He examines the existing actions, information, and rules in a system and asks how else they can change. For us players, behind those clear turns there turns out to be a lot of active searching and active deleting.
So what moves me most in Donald X. Vaccarino's story is not that he put everything into a deck, but that he could also, in another work, take the deck away entirely.
Understanding a creator can also become gentler here. We often remember only another person's most successful idea and then expect them to keep providing familiar pleasure. But on that person's workbench, completely different questions may have been sitting all along. Behind a name already printed on a box, there are still many ideas that need testing, abandoning, and reorganizing.
When reading these interviews with him, I especially like to look at works separately by conception time and publication time. The work everyone first came to know is not necessarily the earliest born; a game released later may also preserve an earlier attempt. This does not require us to treat all prototypes as masterpieces; it merely lets a designer's professional life unfold again from a few covers into a real process of work.
And those friends who repeatedly sit down at the table are not mere decorations in a success narrative either. Their wanting to keep playing, feeling that something isn't fun, or discovering problems under another set of rules all gave the design a shape after it left the author's mind. A board game, after all, has to be handed over to others to use; the final part of creation always happens in another pair of hands.
Creation is sometimes discovering a sufficiently powerful form, and sometimes acknowledging that a new problem needs another form. Being able to retain one's own characteristics without letting those characteristics decide the answers for you is perhaps the most enduring connection among these works.
Next time you buy a score card and shuffle it into your deck, perhaps you can pause for an extra second. That seemingly simple action was once taken out separately from a massive adventure; now, it gently connects your past, your present, and your next hand of cards.
[chengcheng's interactive topic]
When you play Dominion, do you enjoy making your deck run smoothly more, or are you more willing to buy points early and race to end the game before others? Has there ever been a time when a deck you carefully prepared never truly got going until the end of the game, yet still made you unable to resist wanting to try one more round?
Welcome to share your deck-building stories in the comments. I'm chengcheng, and I'll see you next time for another creator story!
#CreatorStory# #Dominion# #Dominion# #DonaldXVaccarino# #DeckBuilding# #BoardGameDesign#
Sources and further reading:
- Written by Donald X. himself: "The Secret History of Dominion"
- Dominion Strategy: An interview with the creator about design and the earliest testing
- The Opinionated Gamers: Creative history and the cuts to "Kingdom Builder"
- Queen Games: Official rules for "Kingdom Builder"
- Rio Grande Games: Official rules for the second edition of "Dominion"
- Dice Tower Dish: An interview with the creator about card rules, player friends, and the starting point of creation
- Fantasy Flight Games: Official rules for "Infiltration"