User talk:Spineflu

The Fan card Creation Guide is an extensive collection of tips and guidelines for fan created cards written by user rinkworks; Aquila later wrote an expansion/updated companion piece to it. The guide is well respected and often referenced in the design and critique of fan made cards.

The rinkworks guide is reproduced here in its entirety, with edits for clarity, formatting, and omitting outdated (first edition) information, with additional content from Aquila and users credited on the edit history of this page.

Introduction

Way, Way TLDR: Playtest your fan cards.

The first rule about creating custom fan cards for Dominion is that you can ignore every single rule about it if you want to. Dominion is a game. Its purpose is fun. If you've got a card idea that sounds fun, do it. Playtest it. If it remains fun after scrutiny, keep playing with it.

Donald X. Vaccarino, the creator of Dominion, on house rules and variants: "I encourage people to play whatever game variants they want, provided they comply with local laws and are agreed upon by all players."

However, this guide might help you create balanced cards without falling into as many pitfalls along the way. If you get past all those, you might still have trouble figuring out how to cost your cards. This guide might help you there, too. Additionally, the later sections of the guide discuss issues related to creating artwork for your cards, printing them, and using them.

Dominion is a very simple, highly flexible game model, and it's very easy to add to. With that flexibility, though, is the potential to make uninteresting ideas. Whilst they may not be flawed, your ideas could get to be disappointing in some way after playing with them for a while. Particularly disappointing if you went through the trouble of getting them printed out. This guide aims to help make your good ideas into great ones before the final send-off to print, big reveal to your friends, etc.; it goes through the design process, identifying where people can take a bad turn, aiming to help refine your card ideas to be just what you want them to be. Whether a single card or a whole bunch of them, or your own expansion, this is going to help.

This guide may look like a rather serious, studious look into the field of Dominion design, but I'm well aware this isn't the most important thing in life and I'm not pretending to be a second Donald X. I just settled into playing and learning the game, the idea of making custom cards came up some day, and I fell in love with the thought instantly. I like designing, and Dominion is a simple yet diverse game that is amazingly expandable. This guide is the product of about 2½ years casually exploring the field, written through personal interest and seeing how the forum is continually active.

Some quick notes on courtesy:

• If you're going into fan card creation with the goal of showing Donald X your cards so he can tell you how good they are and that they'll be in the next dominion expansion, don't. With the exception of Courtyard, DXV dislikes card submissions, avoids the Variants & Fan Cards subforum, and gets upset when they're posted in the endless interview thread. Don't be a jerk to the only person who can get Dominion cards printed legally.
• If you're going into fan card creation with the goal of expanding your board game geek resume, don't. That's thin ice, legally speaking.
• If you're going into fan card creation with the goal of adding all your cards to wiki.dominionstrategy (this site), don't. That's not what the wiki is for.