The Weekend That Changed Card Games

In 2006, Donald X. Vaccarino was a software developer in San Francisco trying to fix a broken game. He’d spent three years building Spirit Warriors—a 500-card fantasy adventure that took four hours to play and was nearly impossible to playtest. Facing a deadline to show the game to his gaming group, he spent a weekend stripping it down to its core problem: how do you introduce new cards over the course of a game?

His solution was to stop introducing them. Put all the cards on the table at the start. Let players buy them into their decks during play. Make the act of building your deck the game itself.

He liked the mechanic so much that he abandoned Spirit Warriors entirely and began developing what would become Dominion. Two years of testing with friends—his playtest group abandoned Magic: The Gathering to play it exclusively. A demo at the 2007 Origins Game Fair caught the attention of Jay Tummelson at Rio Grande Games. Developer Dale Yu coined the name in the shower. In October 2008, Dominion hit shelves. By 2009, it had won the Spiel des Jahres, the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the Diana Jones Award, the Origins Award, and the Mensa Select. The deck-building genre—which had not existed twelve months earlier—was suddenly everywhere.

The Invention

What Vaccarino created was not a game. It was a mechanic that became a genre. Deck-building—starting with a weak hand, purchasing cards from a common supply to strengthen your personal deck, cycling through it repeatedly as the engine you’ve built either hums or sputters—had no precedent as a standalone game format. The ingredients existed separately: Magic: The Gathering had deck construction as a pre-game activity. Rummy games had hand management. Economic games had resource conversion. But nobody had made the construction itself into the central play experience.

Vaccarino has always been transparent about the lineage. Magic inspired him—he’d been designing since 1994, writing fan expansions, contributing to Magic’s Comprehensive Rules, showing prototypes to Richard Garfield on annual pilgrimages to Wizards of the Coast. Thirteen years of serious design work before anything published. He took the pre-game deckbuilding phase and made it the entire game. The distance from prior art is meaningful but not infinite. This is why the invention score is 9 rather than 10: there was a frame of reference. But within that frame, what he assembled was genuinely new, and the hobby recognized it immediately.

The adoption was staggering. Within two years: Ascension (2010), Thunderstone (2009), Arctic Scavengers (2009). Within five: Star Realms (2014), Legendary (2012), DC Deck-Building Game (2012). Within fifteen: Slay the Spire carried the mechanic into video games and sold three million copies. BoardGameGeek added “Deck, Bag, and Pool Building” as a formal mechanic category because Dominion invented the thing the category describes. Over 3,500 tabletop games and 850 video games on Steam now use some form of the mechanic. Every one of them is downstream of Dominion.

The Machine

Dominion’s architecture is a programmer’s game. The base system is a loop: Action phase, Buy phase, Cleanup phase. You play cards from your hand, purchase cards from the supply, discard everything, draw five new cards. The elegance is in what this loop enables. Victory point cards clog your deck. Money cards fuel your engine. Action cards create combos. The tension between building an efficient machine and stuffing it with the dead weight of victory points is the entire strategic landscape, and it emerges from maybe six rules.

The modular kingdom card system is the real engineering achievement. Ten supply piles selected from an ever-growing pool of available cards means each game presents a unique strategic puzzle. After sixteen expansions spanning 2008 to 2024—over 500 unique cards—the base system hasn’t broken. The founder of DominionStrategy.com published a landmark review after 4,000 plays and still found new depth. An AAAI-published paper used Bayesian Belief Networks to model card interactions, finding complex interdependencies that resist simple optimization. One poster famously complained the game grew stale “after a mere 230 plays,” which reviewers cited as unintentional praise.

Other designers studied this architecture explicitly. Ascension started from Dominion’s structure and replaced the fixed market with a rotating row. Star Realms took the buy-play-discard-shuffle loop and added direct combat. Clank! layered the deck-building engine onto a dungeon-crawl board. Dune: Imperium fused it with worker placement. Each borrowed specific structural elements from Dominion. The architecture propagated.

The Narrow Kingdom

Here is where the assessment gets honest. Vaccarino is a one-franchise designer. Not by accident—by choice. After Dominion’s success, he left programming to design games full-time. Kingdom Builder (2012) won a second Spiel des Jahres and proved he could work outside card games, though it drew criticism for shallower strategic depth. Beyond that: Nefarious (2011), Gauntlet of Fools (2012), Android: Infiltration (2012), Temporum (2014), Greed (2014), Winter Kingdom (2020). Competent games, some clever, none that moved the conversation.

When asked about the wave of deck-builders that followed Dominion, Vaccarino was characteristically blunt: he had zero interest in the clones. The inventor who reshaped two industries by inverting someone else’s invention bristled at others doing something similar with his. The tension reveals something about the difference between generosity of philosophy and possessiveness of craft.

His Secret History designer diaries on BoardGameGeek—detailed, card-by-card accounts of every expansion’s development—are widely regarded as some of the most valuable design documentation in the industry. They reveal a designer who tests exhaustively, treats each expansion as a separate design challenge with different self-imposed constraints, and reflects publicly on his own failures. That transparency is itself a form of mastery.

What the Scoring Sees

The invention score reflects the creation of a new genre. Deck-building didn’t exist as a standalone format before Dominion. Every deck-builder since is downstream. The mechanic has crossed into video games. The distance from Magic is meaningful—this is a 9, not a 10—but the adoption is as thoroughly documented as anything in modern tabletop design.

Architecture captures both the quality of Dominion’s construction and its propagation. Sixteen expansions over sixteen years without structural failure. A modular card pool that generates functionally infinite strategic variety from a handful of base rules. Other designers borrowed specific structural elements. This is serious engineering that others noticed and used. It doesn’t quite reach 9 because Dominion defined a genre, not the entire industry’s infrastructure—designers build FROM Dominion’s blueprint, they don’t build WITHIN its system the way hundreds built within AD&D.

Mastery reflects the depth-over-breadth reality. Within the Dominion ecosystem, Vaccarino is a virtuoso—500+ unique cards, each expansion pushing the system in new directions without breaking it. His fourteen-year unpublished apprenticeship and nearly all solo-authored work give him the cleanest attribution record in the project. But outside Dominion, the work is competent without reaching the same altitude. Kingdom Builder won an SdJ but drew criticism. The rest is furniture. Deep mastery in one room, not command across the house.

The Scoring Case

Total: 34 points. Year: 2008.

The Hidden Pattern

Vaccarino is the inverse of Dave Wesely. Wesely created a concept and never systematized it. Vaccarino systematized a concept so thoroughly that it became invisible — deck-building is now so basic a mechanic that its invention feels inevitable. But it wasn’t. Someone had to see that Magic’s pre-game phase could be the whole game.

The deeper pattern is thirteen years of invisible apprenticeship. From 1994 to 2007, Vaccarino designed games nobody played, wrote fan expansions, showed prototypes to Richard Garfield, and learned his craft in total obscurity. Then one weekend of desperate simplification produced a genre. The preparation was the design.

What Remains

Dominion. Over 3,500 tabletop games and 850 video games downstream. A mechanic so thoroughly adopted it has its own BGG category. Slay the Spire carried it into video games and sold three million copies. The machine still runs.

The Secret History diaries. Card-by-card accounts of every expansion’s development, widely regarded as the most valuable design documentation in the hobby. A designer reflecting publicly on his own failures and choices, building a record others learn from.

34 points. 2008. The deck-building machine.

A software developer spent a weekend solving a broken game. The solution became a genre. Fourteen years of apprenticeship, one moment of inversion, and the hobby hasn’t been the same since. Every deck-builder on every shelf is downstream.

He liked the mechanic so much he abandoned the game he was building. Two industries changed because a programmer decided construction was more fun than combat.