Q: Could you please introduce yourself to the readers? Tell a little bit about yourself. What is your profession?

A: Currently I would say my profession is working on Dominion. Before I became a game designer I used to be a computer programmer but I am not anymore.

Q: So did you study informatics or mathematics?

A: I did actually but I dropped out of both, High School and College. I had a computer programming job when I was sixteen. And I saved a certain amount of money and went to College for some time. I did major in Math But I did not graduate. I think it is common among game designers to be math people.

Q: What are your hobbies?

A: My hobbies are game design but my job is Dominion. So I get to work on my hobby as a job. I do not think that there is much more to say. I listen to a lot of music. We have two small children. So I interact with them.

Q: Since last year your name is well-known within the players’ community. On Board Game Geek there are no other entries under your name. Was there another publication before Dominion?

A: No. I did do a text adventure computer game in the 80´s.

Q: Which one?

A: Escape from Planet X. It came out from Covox. I made a lot of games apart from Dominion, dozens games. But I have no other board games or card games published before Dominion. So now I am going to try to get some of my older games published. But Dominion is the first publishment.

Q: When did you have contact with the world of games for the first time and how did you become a game designer?

A: I do not feel like I can really answer the first question. I played games as a kid like most kids do. First I did not really have gamer friends. So I missed out on the main scene of what games there were. For example stuff like Cosmic Encounter I only played after I played Magic. Magic got me a lot of gamer friends and also really made me want to get serious of designing games. I designed games forever occasionally. Mostly they were just like my fixed-up version of something somebody else has done. When I think about it Magic was really what made me want to make about games and sit down and figure out how to make them work. So in some sense it got me into the world of gamers and started me out game designing. But I played games before then and I designed games before then.

Q: So would you say that Magic inspired you for Dominion?

A: No. A lot of people think that because it has got deck building. Well Magic really inspired my career. But I cannot tell you if I would have thought of each person having his own deck or not which I have also done in other games. You can say that Magic had an effect in several ways. Part of what I liked about Magic was that interacting rules on cards and I made tons of those games and Dominion is one of them. But it was not like I saw Magic’s deck building and thought how I can make a game out of that. It was not like that at all. However, there was a very specific inspiration for Dominion: I was working on another game, a game of killers going on quest and fighting monsters.

The original idea for this game was that you would draft a set of four heroes at the start and for each hero you would have a pile of eight cards and you would shuffle the four piles together and that would be your deck for the game. And you could build up your heroes’ abilities with the cards and I realized that this was going to be too complicated. But I really wanted to keep the building up your hero. Because I thought that was a key thing my friends enjoyed. One solution I thought about was you would start with two cards instead of four cards per hero and get the other as the game progressed. So you built a deck as the game went on. When I thought about it I realized I could make that a game by itself where you just build the deck. I checked up some notes for that and put it aside and went back to working on this game but this game acquired so much work that at some point later I was desperate for a new game to play on Monday and I was never finishing this one game. And so this other game I just could whip out because I could just try it with ten cards and it would be easy and so I whipped it out and we all like it.

Q: You told us about your first idea for Dominion when you wrote it done and put it aside. How long did it take from this first idea to the final version of Dominion?

A: I put the first idea aside for several months. I do not remember how many months exactly. I got the first version of the game in a couple of hours over the weekend and we tried that. And then there was a period of two or three months over which I worked on new cards and fixed up the cards that I had. The rules themselves did not change at all in that time except for the configuration of the starting deck. After that I worked on expansions that should not count for this. And so the developments of the game after Rio Grande got it took about a year. We decided which cards actually made it into the deck. Some cards were stolen from expansions. During that time the game rules retreat slightly. So it took a few hours then two or three months and then a year.

Q: So the next question would be: How many ideas for Dominion are still going through your head? I now know that you have already some expansions in your mind and I know that we have the basic game and a new edition and a new expansion. What else is in your mind?

A: Originally when I showed the game to Jay (Tummelson) I had five expansions. I made Dominion and it was just a bunch of cards and I decided okay this will be the main set, this will be the first expansion, this will be the second expansion and I was done. And I made three more games and my friend just refused to try them. They just wanted to play Dominion. So I made more Dominion expansions because that was what my audience wanted, and so the time I showed it to Jay I had five expansions.

As far as ideas for cards I have a long file that is sorted by what kind of card it is. So when I want a new victory card I can look at the list of all the victory card ideas I have. They are ranked on the side so I know this is the one that the last time I looked on this list I thought this was one of the better ideas. Or maybe I am looking for something more specific than that and I can see if I have one of those. I also try to combine ideas when I need them. So that is the big list, so I can look there first. However, it is really a long list, many hundreds of cards but those are like I said mostly bad ideas. And in terms of the good ideas it is a smaller number of hundreds of cards.

There is a problem that the expansions have to get more complicated because there are not so many simple things you could do and so I do not know how many expansions there will be. But there certainly will be more. They probably will not come out as fast as between Intrigue and Sea Side. But yes I have plenty more card ideas.

Q: Do you have ideas for new game mechanics like in Sea Side?

A: Yes I have a list of mechanics, also ranked. Actually a few of my friends who played went through and ranked them themselves.

Q: Something like Planechase Cards (a new Magic mechanic)?

A: Yes something like that I considered early on for an expansion but I decided against on the grounds that basically you get all you ever want out of the cards themselves. And something separate from that like a rule that affects everybody this game is a fine thing to do in some games but it just seems redundant here.

Q: When did you first realize that you designed a very successful game with Dominion?

A: I guess it was at the time when I designed Dominion. My friends have played dozens of games of mine over years. They hate everything and they are not polite about it. Well I was going to show Dominion to my friends and they liked it. I was just looking to make something that we would enjoy playing that would give us another alternative and I was not thinking about publishing at all at that point At that time I had a Magic night and a game night. One night a week we played Magic the Gathering one night different things. Not always my games but very often my games. And for the next few nights we just played Dominion.

Then the Magic night switched so we just played Dominion on that. Then my friends wanted to play without me. They said: I need a copy of that to play it when you are not around. And I thought: Okay this game is a hit. Dominion was the only time I made a game where everyone really just wanted to play Dominion over and over for hours and hours. So I was not trying to get it published but I knew that if it was published it would be successful among gamers. I knew that game was making it. So that was maybe two months after making it.

Q: How important can Dominion become? Does Dominion have the potentiality to become a modern classic like for example Settlers of Catan?

A: I do not know really much about the game industry and it seems likely that there will be people trying to cash it out. It seem like Dominion could make it more acceptable to have text on cards in Germany. I think text on cards is more an American thing. And maybe that is just because when you want to publish it in Europe you have to translate it. Settlers is a high standard to be trying to reach. It sold its millions of copies. I do not know if there is anything that comes close. Like I said in the store they have the Carcassonne shelf next to the Settlers’ shelf. Carcassonne is very successful but it is no Settlers… When I said I knew that the game was going to be successful I knew that it would be successful among gamers. But I did not know if it would be successful among kids, gamers’ wives or whatever and it has been successful among those people.

Q: How important are awards like “German Spiel des Jahres” and “German Deutscher Spielepreis” for you?

A: For me?

Q: For you.

A: Well my understanding from Jay is that the Spiel des Jahres is the only award that really affects sales. There may be some small awards that have sale affect in some markets. He said for example the Finnish game of the year. Finnish people ordered extra copies as a result like that award was going to mean something in Finland. But in general the Spiel des Jahres is really the award that sales lot of copies of a game and winning the DSP does not. This award is really just known among gamers. So winning the Spiel des Jahres obviously means a bunch of good things that are even interesting, e.g. the game sells a lot more of copies, more expansions and it does mean that they want expansions that the families can play who are buying the game because it won the award. It means people may be more interested in publishing games that have my name on it at least for a little while.

Spiel des Jahres is a respected gaming award that makes people trying to get it. The other awards do not sell extra copies and so you do not need to try to win them and it is just a nice thing if you do. It is one thing to think your game is going to be successful and it is another thing to be successful. One measure of success is winning lots awards and Dominion has a nice extensive list. It did not win the IGA and there was something in Vienna it did not win. So it did not win everything but it has done really well winning many many awards. So it is certainly nice to be successful.

Q: Is there any topic all along you would like to design a game about?

A: I pretty much do every topic I want. I guess you could say that the topic that I have done the most without any success is time travel. I have done a lot time travel games that all did not work but  they are really good at getting people to play test them. And I made a lot of twentiest gangster games and many of those are some of my hits among my friends. Actually I just try to entertain myself with the flavor.

The issue with Dominion is that some people complain that it got this Middleville theme like this was a contest marketing move: Give it a Middleville theme that would sale. But this was not my thought at all. I thought I would make a Middleville Kingdom game because that sounds fun.There is no topic I want to make that I have not. Most of the games start with the mechanics and then I pick the flavor that seems appropriate to the mechanics and after that I work out the rest of the details. I have done some games that were based on flavor from the start but normally I start with the mechanic. So there are a lot of mechanics I would like to make but I have not yet.

Q: We already know that you like to play board games or cards. How often do you find the time to play?

A: I play two nights a week. But it is really all play testing. I really do not have the time to play other peoples games. I think over the last two years I have played maybe two games total that were not mine. But it is even worse because I have to struggle to find time to play test my games that are not Dominion because Dominion needs up so much play testing time

Q: Do you play Magic anymore?

A: No, Dominion killed Magic. I have bought the next couple of sets but we never played them. And I said okay I stop buying them. I mean, I played Magic from 1994 until 2006 and I made Dominion in 2006. We used to play Magic and Magic was really the two player game and whenever we were just two players we played Magic. Sometimes the game night would be a Magic night because only one of the persons showed up and well we played Magic that is two players. Well you can play Dominion with two players but this was not exactly intentional. I mean it is just the game idea and I tried it and now when we are two players we play Dominion. So Magic lost its night and then it lost its status as the two player game.

There were many good years. I am credited in the Magic Rules. I was a rules Guru who was one of the people outside of Wizards who they asked for advice on how they should change the rules when they made the sixth edition rules some years back. I have no idea what effect I had if any. I made my suggestions and if they did something that I suggested I do not know if they thought of it themselves. Normally I credit myself with suggesting for “haste”. I suggested that name and they did use it. They raised that question as which is better “speed” or “surprise”. And I suggested “haste” and somehow it is “haste”. So maybe that was that. There are other things that maybe come from me but I do not know. But anyhow I am in the credits. When you look at the Magic Credits there is a big list of names and you find Donald X Vaccarino.

Q: Which kind of games do you prefer to play (besides Magic or Dominion)?

A: Besides my own games I played Magic and Reiner Knizia games. We played a lot of those. There may be a lot of other people who matter for how good a game is but the author is really the single most significant indicator of how much I like it if it is by the same author. Knizia is a special case. He has so many games. So you go to the store you look for a new game to try and you say well I can trust Reiner Knizia.

Q: How many board and card games do you own?

A: Not so many. I do not know. I am trying to measure it in terms of that door (We sat in front of a normal door, about 90 cm * 200 cm.). Less than two doors        maybe more like just one door as far as board games and not counting Magic and not counting my games.

Q: Which three games are your all time favorites?

A: It is just impossible to pick the one after Magic. And Magic has two really horrible sides. There are too many rules to know and sometimes you do not get to play because you do not draw enough lands or you draw to many lands. Despite of this Magic is still one of the best games ever. It was my favorite game for many years and I never thought I would make a game that I would like as much as Magic. And whatever I would put second it is going to be so far below it. There are games that I respect that I think that was a good idea and that was well done like Carcassonne. But how much did I really play Carcassonne: There is nothing that I have played enough that I would say it is one of my all time favorites.

Q: Do you want to tell our readers anything else?

A: No I do not.

Q: In advance of this interview we tried to find out something about you. And in the internet it seems as if you were a ghost. Nobody knows anything about you.

A: You are not talking about the thing when people thought I was a phantom or whatever. I missed a plane. You miss one plan and they think you do not exist. Why wouldn’t I put my name on Dominion? If you have made Dominion you probably put your name on it. It is ridicules I missed a plane and the next flight was not going to be in time to get to the press conference. So I missed a plane. If you miss a plane watch out people will be selling your stuff because you do not exist anymore. If you search in the internet you find stuff about me, e.g. you find some programming scripts I wrote and you find my name listed in the credits for Magic.