This is a tool that randomly (but NOT uniformly) generates sets of (usually) 10 Kingdom cards for
the card game Dominion. It uses a somewhat complicated algorithm and a
really complicated data set to make the generation very customizable.
If you leave the settings on "default", you'll get a generator that
tries to generate "balanced" sets -- sets that have bits of everything
and are fun to play. To get a traditional "pure uniformly random" selection,
change the "Overall Balance" field to 0. And to get screwy sets, try setting
it to a negative value.
More information can be found at the bottom of this page.
Basic Controls
Cards Picked
None yet! Click on one of the buttons above.
Sets Owned
Click on which sets you own. When you generate a set, the generator will remember your settings here.
Global Settings
Cards to force into set (comma-separated):
Overall Balance:
Attribute Section (Click here to see how to use this)
Attribute Section (Click here to hide how to use this)
Each Kingdom card has a list of attributes in the heirarchical display below. For example,
Moat has the attributes "Base", "Cost2", "Cheap", "Reaction", "Terminus", "Cumulative", "Carddrawer", "Blocker", "Selfmiller", "Speeder", and "Interactive". Move your mouse over an attribute name to see a short summary of what that attribute means.
For each attribute, you can ask the Set Generator to do something special for it. "Default" means to accept the default settings. "Avoid" means to avoid putting this attribute in the set. "Fewer" means to discourage putting this attribute in the set. "More" means to encourage putting this attribute in the set. "Only" means to favor extremely heavily putting cards with this attribute in the set.
Note that these settings are cumulative but not distributed. For example, if you generate a set that is "Only" for ("Cornucopia" and "Cost 3"), you will get all the 3-Cost cards from Cornucopia, and then the rest will be filled out with either 3-Cost cards or Cornucopia cards. But if you generate a set that is "Only" ("Cornucopia" and "Prosperity"), you might end up with a set that is all Cornucopia or all Prosperity -- there is no guarantee that there will be at least one card in every "Only" category you pick.
You can click on Custom to fine-tune a specific attribute. Perhaps most of use is when you want a specific range of an attribute. For example, say it is somewhat important to have 3-to-5 cards of cost 2. Then click on "Custom..." next to Cost2, click on Range, set Min to 3 and Max to 5, then click on "Medium" in the Importance section.
Sets
Prices
Colors
Defense
Providers
Action Control
Deckmiller
Strategy
Range:
(Imagine there's a slider here.)
Min = ,
Max =
Importance:
Extreme (100000)
Major (50)
Medium (10)
Minor (2)
Invert
Raw Value:
Dense -- "none or lots"
Sparse -- "don't have too many"
Manual
Min:
Max:
MinW:
MaxW:
About (continued)
Dominion Set Generator is written by Wei-Hwa Huang.
E-mail him at onigame at gmail tod com if you have
any comments or feature requests. Wei-Hwa is
especially interested in Javascript UI gurus who can
make this page look nice.
Yes, Donald X. has looked at earlier versions of this
and given some helpful tips and directions.
Feel free to use the results of the card picker, but
if you want to use the code, talk to me about
licensing.
Here's a list of some features I'm planning to add, so don't bother
requesting them. Do tell me which ones you'd like to see first though:
Let users save their settings when they revisit this page
Consider previous card sets -- user can discourage cards from previous sets from
showing up
Allow user to ban specific cards
Change the "owned" list to include real-life sets (not just mini-Goko splits)
Canonicalize card names?
Allow user to request/ban Shelters, Colony, Platinum
Update Log
12-12-17 UPDATE: Added Hinterlands and Cornucopia cards, decreased the weights towards keeping cards
in the same expansion somewhat.
12-12-20 UPDATE: Added an "Overall Balance" flag.
12-12-21 UPDATE: Added Shelters, Platinum/Colony, Young Witch, moved Update Log to bottom. The major
settings (expansions owned, overall balance, cards to force into set) are saved.
12-12-31 UPDATE: Added "Donline" rules -- choose Shelters and Platinum/Colony based on all cards you
own, instead of just the set of 10. Donald recommends this for online play for more variety.
13-01-09 UPDATE: Someone suggested that "Always" is misleading -- it implies "Give me at least one of
these", which is very confusing if you choose multiple categories. (E.g., if you say "Always Prosperity and
Always Alchemy", you'll end up with a set that's all Prosperity and Alchemy, but it might be 10 Prosperity with
no Alchemy or vice-versa.) I changed the word to "Only" to see if that helps.
13-01-10 UPDATE: Decreased the default strength of Branchers ("Villages") and the density of the small sets. Generally it was a bit too eager to add Branchers, and it turns out that too many Alchemy cards does not make things very fun.
13-01-13 UPDATE: Significant changes to the default weights based on Matt E. on dominionstrategy creating a useful statistical analysis tool.
13-01-13 UPDATE: Some rearrangement of page elements to try to make things more user-friendly.
13-01-14 UPDATE: Thanks to Donald for the idea, we now can make Uniform sets! A Uniform set uses the same underlying engine, but generates lots of parallel sets with independent cards to ensure that each card has an equal chance of showing up.
13-06-12 UPDATE: Added display of which set each card came from.
13-06-14 UPDATE: Added Guilds.