Donald X. Vaccarino

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Donald X. Vaccarino (born 1969) is an American board and card game designer. He published the card game Dominion in 2009, which won the Spiel des Jahres award along with many others, and has had 15 expansions, 2 of which have been combined into one. [1] Dominion and its expansions have sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide, as of 2017. [2] His 2012 game Kingdom Builder also won the Spiel des Jahres award. [3]

Contents

With Dominion, Vaccarino has been credited with pioneering the genre of deck-building games. [4] Dominion has been studied academically as a test-bed for how evolving game rules can create balanced play. [5]

Vaccarino became self-employed as a game designer in 1994. He lives in California and is a trained programmer. [6] Before his success as a game designer, Vaccarino was influenced by Magic: The Gathering and was credited with contributing to the game in the Comprehensive Rules of Magic. [7] Vaccarino's games have been published by companies including Rio Grande Games [8] and Queen Games. [9]

Selected works

Vaccarino's published works include: [10]

See also

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References

  1. "Dominion Announces 15th Expansion". GAMING. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  2. "Table-top Generals". The Economist. Retrieved 6 November 2021.
  3. "Kingdom Builder". Spiel des Jahres. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  4. Livingstone, Ian; Wallis, James (2019-09-17). Board Games in 100 Moves. Penguin. p. 150. ISBN   978-1-4654-9871-7.
  5. Mahlmann, Tobias; Togelius, Julian; Yannakakis, Georgios N. (June 2012). "Evolving card sets towards balancing dominion". 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. pp. 1–8. doi:10.1109/CEC.2012.6256441. ISBN   978-1-4673-1509-8. S2CID   15555254.
  6. Dagmar (2021-02-03). "Spelauteur onder het vergrootglas: Donald X. Vaccarino – Spellengek" (in Dutch). Retrieved 2023-12-06.
  7. Hiwiller, Zack (2018-08-14). The Game Designer's Playlist: Innovative Games Every Game Designer Needs to Play. Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN   978-0-13-487329-9.
  8. "Dominion". Rio Grande Games. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  9. "Kingdom Builder". Queen Games - Connecting Generations. 2021-01-21. Retrieved 2022-11-29.
  10. "Donald X. Vaccarino". www.luding.org. Retrieved 2022-11-29.