There is this really cool card game Dominion where a big part is trying to make the best out of a random set of 10 cards, that all have different characteristics and work more or less well together.
Depending on how the game is played this involves picking 10 cards out of a total of minimum 24 cards and up to a maximum of approx. 300 different cards.
But don’t worry, this won’t be a post about urns & balls, the point is merely that when randomly selecting 10 cards from such a huge and varied pool it may happen that the selected cards don’t synergize well together, which can result in a bad game experience.
In order to avoid this situation I created a dashboard that allows to draw random sets of 10 cards, while at the same time respecting some ground-rules which ensure that the resulting set will allow for an interesting game of Dominion:
Key features of the dashboard
- The dashboard allows to either create
- “balanced” kingdoms which contain at least 1x draw-, 1x village-, 1x attack-, 1x trashing-card
- “unbalanced” kingdoms which can contain everything, but optionally also can be fine-tuned if e.g. one wants to exclude all attacks or trashers.
- The resulting kingdoms are also shown as a comma separated string which can be easily copy&pasted for use on www.dominion.games.
Technical implementation
- Dashboard is a Shiny Application hosted on shinyapps.io
- Card data is being sourced live from http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com
- The generator tries 100x to find a suitable set of cards, however, after 100 unsuccessful attempts it gives up and returns the last kingdom found, even if this kingdom has less than 10 cards
Further resources