DimOnion: Modern Times fixes. Play testing in progress

http://mtaur.deviantart.com/art/DimOnion-Modern-Times-412030527

Click above to see DimOnion: Modern Times. After some play testing, I changed a few cards and updated the page. More play testing tomorrow. I actually have four people this time. They will probably be confused by the complicated nature of Modern Times, but... that's the theme!

But seriously, one of the strengths of the canonical game is the relative simplicity of the cards. While I chose to push harder to make the cards feel like what they do in real life, Dominion is a lot more vague and loose.

In early play testing, combinations of Kids These Days/Property Insurance/Google were pretty cool and fun together (Kids These Days on a Duchy to get a Google in hand, and then get the Duchy back, for example; then Google your Province to draw a Gold or whatever you need). Google is a Sage variant that shines in totally different circumstances than Sage does, and it can be really powerful when you get early Provinces.

Debt took forever to balance. It tended to either evaporate harmlessly, or bog the game down forever. In its current form, Insider may weigh the game down horribly in 4-player, still.

House was a horribly underpowered card earlier, and I have doubts whether it will be a sufficiently useful card in a broad variety of games as it stands now. We'll see.

Anyway, enough rambling.

DimOnion: Modern Times update - Flavor text

As a general writing guide, I'm not so sure that I really should be using Donald X. Vaccarino as a reference point, but in this case, it's thoroughly justified. See the previous post or jump straight to the full-resolution card set image on DeviantArt for context.

Here's the new flavor text:

You have to spend money to make money, they say. Preferably, someone else's money, or money that you don't have yet. Or maybe the only way to pay off a debt is to go into debt. Or was it the only way to make money is to go into debt so you can spend money to make money for collateral to go into debt to make money?

The quaint aphorisms of ages past just can't keep up with the complexities of modern times, it seems. To get ahead, you will need to leverage every asset, win every sporting event, ride every wave, and escape on a golden parachute on an inside tip. You might even gerrymander your apartment if it'll put you one step ahead of the next guy.

You come from a very long line of shrewd rulers, after all. And just like in ages past, ingrates flood the streets, only this time, instead of pitchforks they wield cardboard signs and iPhones, which they use to Tweet and Facebook their petty grievances.They have iPhones and they're complaining! Those ingrates! You're sure they would make a U.N. resolution against job creators if they could, but luckily, your man's on the inside and not theirs. To hell with them. If they won't work for minimum wage, someone in another hemisphere will for half that, hopefully less. Health Insurance? Over... someone's dead body, preferably theirs.

You could buy up every foreclosed house in town, and that may make you content for a while, but there are bigger fish to fry. And to fry fish, you need oil. Not vegetable oil - no, what you need is sweet, succulent petroleum, mother's milk, honey of the gods, ambrosia, aqua vitae, dino juice, Arabian gold, Tehran Tea... it has many names, but with any luck, it will serve only one master: you.

Those oil fields might only last another 10-20 years, but that's half a lifetime from now and you're pushing 50. They say the meek will inherit the Earth (or what's left of it), but that's not your problem. Live it up while the living's good, chief executive. These modern times move fast.

DimOnion - Modern Times

You have to spend money to make money, they say. Preferably, someone else's money, or money that you don't have yet. Or maybe the only way to pay off a debt is to go into debt. Or was it the only way to make money is to go into debt so you can spend money to make money for collateral to go into debt to make money?

The quaint aphorisms of ages past just can't keep up with the complexities of modern times, it seems. To get ahead, you will need to leverage every asset, win every sporting event, ride every wave, and escape on a golden parachute on an inside tip. You might even gerrymander your apartment if it'll put you one step ahead of the next guy.

You come from a very long line of shrewd rulers, after all. And just like in ages past, ingrates flood the streets, only this time, instead of pitchforks they wield cardboard signs and iPhones, which they use to Tweet and Facebook their petty grievances.They have iPhones and they're complaining! Those ingrates! You're sure they would make a U.N. resolution against job creators if they could, but luckily, your man's on the inside and not theirs. To hell with them. If they won't work for minimum wage, someone in another hemisphere will for half that, hopefully less. Health Insurance? Over... someone's dead body, preferably theirs.

You could buy up every foreclosed house in town, and that may make you content for a while, but there are bigger fish to fry. And to fry fish, you need oil. Not vegetable oil - no, what you need is sweet, succulent petroleum, mother's milk, honey of the gods, ambrosia, aqua vitae, dino juice, Arabian gold, Tehran Tea... it has many names, but with any luck, it will serve only one master: you.

Those oil fields might only last another 10-20 years, but that's half a lifetime from now and you're pushing 50. They say meek may inherit the Earth (or what's left of it), but that's not your problem. Live it up while the living's good, chief executive. These modern times move fast.
(Cross-posted at the Dominion strategy forum.)

Yes, I'm at it again. Another fan set for Dominion, this currently quite oversized at 33 cards.

Be sure to look at the full resolution image at http://mtaur.deviantart.com/art/Modern-Times-412030527. Even if you enlarge the image above, you won't be able to read the fine print on a lot of them.

Oil Field is probably game-breakingly snowballerrific. Debt might be a horribly volatile mechanic, but I have some hope that it can be reined in. Amazon + The Consolidator may be the strongest combo on the board, depending on what else you've got throwing Debts at you. For those of you not looking to rack up Dept, perhaps get a Gas Station or three, some extra buys, and a lot of basic Treasures.

I hope to play test this soon. It will likely need tweaks large and small.

DimOnion - Halloween

Just in time. Well, not if you actually wanted to actually print them out and play them, but oh well.

Disclaimers and so on at my deviantart page for this creation.

I really just took the fun mechanics of Dominion and very literally and single-mindedly tried to figure out what these famous archetypes would do in this setting.  Smashing things together and smoothing out kinks is 85% of it, and the other 15% is MS paint (yes, I know, I am a ruffian).