I spent today dusting off my old PHP and SQL skills. If you play the card game Dominion, you may be well aware that an expansion just released called Dominion: Intrigue that doubles the number of cards. (If you don’t play Dominion, what the hell, man? It’s the best card game since Texas Hold’Em.)
Well, there’s an issue with playing with both the base set of Dominion and the new Intrigue set. To figure out which ten cards to play with, you have to mix cards from different sets together, shuffle, draw and then put those away and get out the piles of the corresponding cards. What a chore.
So I threw together the Dominion Card Picker.
With it, you can choose which sets you want to play with (including the promo cards if you have them) and the script will shoot out a random ten cards for you to play with, including letting you know which set each belongs to so you can dig them out of the correct box.
You can also add constraints to make the selection less lame like requiring a card with an extra buy to be in the ten or at least one card that nets an extra action.
Try it out and let me know if there are bugs or any ideas to improve it.


20 Comments
How about an option to generate a nice distribution of prices? For the complete set, that would be :
1@ $2
2@ $3
3@ $4
3@ $5
1@ $6
Zach,
I’d like to second a request I saw on the geek. A checkbox for text only would be very useful.
-Bryan
Grakthis posted this on MTGRobot:
“tell your friend to re-format this page so it looks better on phones and other mobile platforms. it’s awful on my pre. he just needs to make it less “landscape” looking and more vertical. Also, make the page smaller and the box for entering the info bigger. Also, have him just code it as a Pre app, tia.”
Tell him to get an iPhone.
jk, I’ll add it to my list.
Allowing choice of a 5-5 or x-y Dominion-Intrigue split would be nice.
A button to record a play to the geek (including card set in the comments) would be TOTALLY RAD.
You got mentioned on page 3 of this article:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_213/6338-Dominion-Over-All
Awesome tool. I have seen a bug. I occasionally will get duplicate cards. Two workshops, two envoys etc… when I run the tool.
Ditto on the duplicate card bug.
Settings: Base + Intrigue, all options on except distribution.
What algorithm do you use to prevent dups?
Just want to say thanks for creating it. I started lunchtime gaming at work a few months ago and now we often have two games of dominion going, since I’ve started breeding gamers. Even my husband will play this one with me. This makes the card picking so much easier. Added as a favorite on my smart phone as well, and sent it to all my dominion players. Thanks again!
Really cool idea. I think I know what your next step should be. Somehow turn this into an app for Iphone or Ipod. Much easier to carry that around then a computer.
2 things, since part of the purpose is to limit the hunting and pecking you might want to offer two sortby options.
Sort by alphabetical only (I just combined all my sets to make life easier)
or Sort by Set then by Alphabetical.
2nd is another filter - “include at least 1 attack card”
Not sure how you did the programming, but if you have DB or arrays you should have the info to allow for the sort-by.
Ditto on the sorting - I like that it sorts by cost, but if it could then sort alphabetically (i.e. sort by cost first then alphabetical) it would be greatly appreciated. Use this all the time! Thanks!
A way to select custom cards would be great.
When using “Another 10 cards” the option “If there is an Attack card, require a Reaction card.” isn’t remembered.
I would like an option that if a card that generates curses that a card that can potentially remove a curse also be added (either through discard a card or modify)
Alrighty. Added alphabetical sorting.
Hi there! I would like to ask your permission to use your scanned card images for a JavaScript version of Dominion Card Picker. I would like to have a tool that I can use on my netbook when I do not have an internet connection.
Thanks,
Chris.
Hi Chris. I don’t own the images. They are mostly scraped from the images on BoardGameGeek. If you haven’t been to there, I’d recommend it. All that I ask is for folks not to hotlink my images, but if you are working on an offline app that shouldn’t be a problem.
Hi, sorry, I think I may have crashed your Dominion card picker; I accidentally sent a randomize request with the Stash promo card checked while all the others were unchecked.
I just checked it. It shouldn’t crash, just give you an error message. Try again.