It’s available as an eBook, great if you’ve left everything a little late, so grab a copy, enjoy it, and why not consider writing your own remixes as well. It’s a chance to discover game design can be as rewarding as playing, or a chance to inspire a budding game designer to start down the path.

It’s a quick game to learn, and quick to play once everyone knows the rules. Each round every player takes on a role: Prospector, Builder, Producer, Trader, Councillor. As with Puerto Rico, the roles chosen give you a benefit, cheaper buildings, more production and so on.

The game is directed around managing your hand of cards. Trading, Prospecting and the Councillor allow you to draw more cards. Building requires you to discard cards from your hand to pay for a building to be created (another card from your hand). More expensive buildings are worth more at the end of the game, but are obviously harder to build. When a player has built 12 buildings, the game ends.

There are five production buildings, corn has been replaced with silver to give a fifth producible resource. When the producer is selected, only one of your production buildings creates an item, with no shipping this limits the number of items available to sell whilst trading.

Other than the role cards, all the components are simply cards from the deck, production is represented by face down cards on your buildings, and money is cards discarded from your hand. This makes the game very portable, easy to set-up and tear down, and means it doesn’t require much space to play.

All in all, a good quick game when you’ve not got time or inclination for a full session of Puerto Rico, or if you’ve only got two players.

Neither will be particularly earth shattering, but they should make it a better experience overall.

First off, your settings will be remembered across visits, so if you find a combination of sizes that generates useful tiles then those settings will be used by default every time you visit the generator.

Secondly, if you generate a board that removes all the squares from a row then that row will no longer be shown. Hiding empty rows will mean the board always displays in the same place, no more risk of losing one to lots of blank rows.

Building a strong foundation, sticking to and repeating your core message and perfecting your craft are all ways to build up to that success.

My most popular work is always the Dungeons and Dragons map tile generator. It has slowly gained in popularity over time, and now drives the vast majority of visits to the toadflaxgames site. In the spirit of building on foundations to promote successes, I’m going to be making some improvements to the generator, to make it the best it can be.

Let me know if there are any improvements you’d like to see, and I’ll look at implementing them.

While doing this, I’ve used my Google Analytics reports to have a quick look at the visitor breakdown, in terms of which browser they are using.

Firefox and IE8 are the major browsers, getting almost two thirds of the total visits between them, it’s clear that these modern browsers are where most of the attention should be focussed on keeping the site looking good.

Chrome, Safari and Opera are all much less used, but with good support for standards the site should look good if it works in Firefox.

The use of older IE versions is more troubling. IE7 is not great, but has enough of a visitor presence to be worth devoting some time to. IE6 makes it hard to create nice looking sites, with only 8% of visits from this source I can afford to not spend the disproportionate amount of time I’d need to on this legacy browser.

For quick testing of sites I use IETester, allowing side-by-side comparison of all major IE versions, it’s very useful. Firebug is key to making quick improvements in Firefox, and you should use it if you do any web development.

I hope this numbers and the linked resources are of use to someone, it’s worth spending the time to make your website look good in the major browsers, it’ll be rewarded in more visits and your visitors staying for longer once they find the site.

I’m only using the basic set, with the original 25 action cards. Dominion – Intrigue, Seaside and Alchemy will have to wait for another time.

Big money is very strong when there are no attack cards in the set of ten you are playing with. Add in attacks, especially Witches and Thieves, and the value quickly reduces.

Witches are powerful if you are the only playing using them, they give everyone else a curse card, with -1VP, which is not only negative, but also pads out your deck, making each further draw difficult.

Cards that give further actions are good, but you need to make sure there is a decent plan to use the bonus, just chaining a lot of actions won’t help you win.

Remodel lets you change cards to new, more expensive ones, and there’s a valid strategy concentrating on this, but it’s easy to play it wrong.

Mines are useful to make your bad coin cards into much better ones.

If you are playing Big Money, then adding in a Chapel card can really help, thinning out your deck to allow quicker draws of your most valuable money cards.

Playing with random sets of ten cards is most fun, it stops you only considering your favourite cards, and avoids missing out on entertaining sets or combinations you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Don’t play with random sets for the first game (unless you are teaching experienced gamers), but be brave and use one the second time around.

You start the game with a very small deck of cards, consisting of money and victory points.

Your turn is two phases, one is used to take an Action, the other to buy cards to add to your deck. Once you’ve completed your turn, you discard your hand, and draw five new cards from your deck.

Each game has several types of cards available for you to add to your deck, money, victory point and action cards. Each have different costs, different values and can be more or less useful to your strategy.

There are three types of money card, Copper, Silver and Gold (these give 1,2 or 3 coins to spend on cards). There are three types of victory point cards, Estate, Duchy and Province (worth 1, 3 or 6 VPs).

There are ten types of action card available. The Dominion game contains a total of 25 types of action card, so each time you play you can use a new set, leading to a great deal of replayability.

Action cards can let you do many things, draw extra cards, take extra actions, buy more times or more expensive items, or alter your deck (remove or replace cards). It’s important to remember the aim of the game here, it’s not to collect lots of action cards or have a long turn, but to gain the greatest number of VPs.

The game ends when all Provinces have been purchased, or when three stacks of action cards are empty. Each player then counts their victory points, and the player with the highest total wins.

The simplest decent strategy is known as ‘Big Money’. Buy a Province if you can afford it, otherwise buy Gold, otherwise buy Silver. This gets lots of VPs very quickly, and can easily win if other players are too absorbed in gathering action cards.

It’s not the best strategy, but you need to make sure that whatever you plan on using can beat it, otherwise you’ll lose to a Big Money player.

Dominion is for 2-4 players, it’s great fun, easy to teach and quite quick to play. You can easily play several games in an evening, or fit it around a longer game to fill an hour or so. There are a number of expansions that add new cards, so it should stay fresh for a good long while.

Each of the roles has a different ability, from the assassin able to ‘kill’ another character and prevent them taking their turn, to the warlord able to pay to destroy a district belonging to another player.

The roles are numbered 1-8, selected secretly and then played in order. With fewer players not all roles are taken, so some special moves can be wasted. The bluff and counter bluff of role selection leads to a lot of the game’s fun.

The districts all cost a certain amount of gold to buy, and are worth this many points at game end. The first player to complete eight districts gets a bonus, and if any other player completes before game end then they get a slightly smaller bonus. You also score more points if you complete one district of each type.

This is a quick and fun game, it plays interestingly with 2 players, and is probably best with 4-5. Nice to fill in a spare half hour to hour around the main game of the evening

Players compete to explore one of five lost cities, moving along a track by playing numbered cards to get closer to the goal. The closer you get, the more points you score.

It’s a nice quick game, easy to learn and fast to play. It’s possible to play with either three rounds or one, and a one round game is a good way to finish an evening when there’s not enough time to play a longer game, or a good way to start when waiting for a tardy player.

There are 110 cards, with two sets numbered 0 to 10 in each colour. To take a step along a path you play one card, and then to take another step you must play a card of the same value or higher.

Turns are quick, either playing a card or discarding, then drawing to refill your hand.

As you move along the tracks there are certain bonus tiles, either extra points, free moves or artefacts (worth points at the end of the game). The bonus tiles are randomly dealt at the start of the game, and great attention needs to be taken of them to ensure victory.

You have five playing pieces to move along the tracks, one is larger than the others, and worth double points. It’s important to send this piece along your best scoring track, to maximise its value. A piece that only moves a couple of spaces will lose points, so don’t start along a track unless you are sure it is possible to move a fair way along it.

The game finishes when all cards are used, or when five pieces have crossed a bridge (about 2/3 along a path). Then each player scores their points, and a winner is declared.

This is a fun game to fill a spare half hour / hour. It’s unlikely to hold up to many repeated plays, and it’s not going to replace your favourite game any time soon.

I’ve done a bit of analysis on the original game, counting the number of connections, and their length. I thought it might be useful for someone else, so I’m sharing it here.

There are:

• 36 cities
• 78 total routes
• 22 doubled routes

So we have a total of 100 possible connections.

If we analyse them by the colour of the edge, then we see the following.

The first number in a set shows the number of routes, the second shows the number of individual routes of that colour.

The only double routes that are of one colour are grey. There are 4 double routes of length 1, and 6 of length 2.

Every colour has 7 routes. They have at least one route of every length from 2 to 6.