X Marks The Spot For Table Talk

It was a special day on Table Talk, WJON's bi-weekly show about board gaming, on Saturday. The creator of the blockbuster, deck building game "Dominion," Donald X. Vaccarino joined the show via telephone from California.

Donald X. has won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award twice, in 2009 for "Dominion" and again in 2012 for "Kingdom Builder." He has created over 12 games and his next title "Moon Colony Bloodbath" is due out in January.

Donald X. was gracious enough to get up at about 6:00 a.m. his time to call into the show and discuss "Moon Colony Bloodbath" and some of his other games with co-host William Pankratz and me. We started by having Donald X. give us a rundown of what Moon Colony Bloodbath is all about. He says Moon Colony is an engine-building/engine-losing game:

"You have a tableau of cards that give you special abilities and various bad things happen that cause you to lose people and eventually you will have to lose some of your cards. It also has a shared deck that the game builds and the players build so every turn you turn over a card from this deck and it makes something happen"

He says Moon Colony is a very dramatic game where the game ends in one of two ways, either one player's colony is eliminated or you make it to the bottom of the event deck and then the moon colonies are successful and whoever has the most survivors wins. Donald X. told us the game played pretty smoothly right away but he did almost a year's worth of play testing on it.

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In addition to "Moon Colony Bloodbath" Donald X. is working on two other new games "Pacific" and "Chef's Choice" that he feels are pretty polished but he doesn't have a release date on those games yet.

We asked Donald X. about the possibility of getting more cards for two of his other games, "Greed," and "Andriod Infiltration." He says Green wouldn't work well with more cards:

"As your deck gets larger, it gets harder to line things up even if it's even. You'll have a card that likes cars, and then a card with a car on it and you need to line those up and the bigger the deck is the harder that is even if you've maintained the percentages you'll be more likely to have a game where you just can't get a car."

He continued that if you play "Android Infiltration" you should play with the rules variant which is more along the lines of his original rules for the game before the publisher drastically changed them.

We ended the show by discussing how one of his new games, "Chef's Choice," was originally going to be called "Zoobreak" and how that name change came about. It was a great time talking to Donald X. about his new games and some of his classics. You can catch Table Talk every other Saturday on AM 1240/95.3 FM, at 8:10 a.m. opposite the Woods Garden Show.

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