This is the overview page of the The Domino Diaries.

Click any of the links below to visit a specific game. They are roughly sorted based on simplicity.

The core mechanic of these games is the fun and time-tested domino tile. You’ll be placing tiles in a shared map, or in your own little worlds, trying to shape a unique world that scores you the most points or does what you need to win.

Some people only know the word “domino” from its origin: chunky white tiles with dots on both sides showing numbers 1–6 (like dice), and you simply had to match the numbers. I use it in the way that games like Kingdomino have used it.

A domino is simply a rectangular tile that has two different sides, and the core idea of the game is to combine these dominoes in your own little map, in such a way that you score the most points. (By matching colors, combining paths, creating areas of the same terrain, etcetera.)

Besides that shared mechanic, the games are completely different and truly unique.

This all started with a project called Theme Parque. I had the idea for a game where you’d built queues together, and longer queues obviously scored more (and made the rollercoaster at its end worth more). But they only scored if you claimed them first. So there was this nice push-and-pull of “let’s wait until the queue is a bit longer … but let’s not wait too long, or someone else might claim it before me”.

All of this felt most intuitive in a “theme park” game, in which you were building the park by placing dominoes. And so I quickly tested a paper prototype, refined it, wrote it down as “really promising, do when all the other projects are done” … and continued with the other projects.

By the time I finally got around to this, a few more things had happened. The birthday of my little sister was coming up, and there’d been jokes about going to some tiny theme park in the Netherlands called Dinoland … but we weren’t allowed to go, because there was a maximum age limit :p So I thought to myself: why not bring Dinoland to us by making some domino-placement game about creating Jurassic Park?

I’d also initially put the idea on the backburner because it required extra components. It couldn’t be entirely print-n-play, or so I thought, because we needed some pawns or cubes to mark which queues were yours. Now, however, I’d made many more games and found very simple solutions to keep these games completely “printable”. (I really, really don’t want to make too many games that require you to already have certain components or provide something extra yourself.)

Now many ideas were starting to come together, with a shared mechanic and theme, while I was under a strict time limit to actually flesh them out and get a playable version for the birthday. And so the Domino Diaries were started and its first entries quickly made.

I think the entire idea of domino placement (in board games) is worth its weight in gold. It is so easy to understand and play, while providing endless challenges and strategies. Because with every move, every placement of that domino, you have to consider multiple things. Because there are multiple things on every domino, and multiple ways to orient it!

And in the end, every good game is just a series of simple decisions like: “do I want A, B or C?”

Anyway, that’s the backstory behind this project and its games. They are all completely unique, with their own rules, art, ideas, fonts, etcetera. As such, for more detailed credits, visit the individual pages.

This shared (overview) page uses the fonts Domino (wow, guess why I chose that font) and Space Grotesk (because it’s hard edges on letter curves reminded me of the rectangular dominoes). Any other graphics are pulled from the individual games I’d already finished by the time I made this page and its graphics.