On Sat, 13 Jun 2009, Benjamin Caplan wrote: > Kerim Aydin wrote: >> 1. Cards are dealt from an infinite deck (with set probabilities) and >> destroyed when played. Reason: the reason cards broke so often in the >> past version was because with a finite deck, everyone's play stopped >> every time there was controversy about where even a single card was >> (e.g. you wouldn't play poker if you knew the Ace of Spades was on the >> floor). > > It might be nice to have a discard pile for Cards to interact with. A > complete history wouldn't be necessary; a three- or five-card buffer > should be plenty. Ambiguities get stomped by cards being played on top > of them, in addition to simple ratification. > > Actually, having read the rest of the proto, Discard Picking sidesteps > this very neatly. Never mind.
It's also possible to do your method; Discard Picking works on the last N card played. Not sure which is better, "last N" is a bit harder to track but allows some strategy (play a valuable card then play N not- so-valuable to bury it. Hmm... >> 2. Play Speed/salary: Get 3 cards per month minimum salary >> + 1 per week (weekly office) >> + 1 per month (monthly office) >> + one per week if a timely Judge >> + 1 * II per adopted proposal >> >> 3. Encourage play: 1 card per month destroyed at random from each hand. >> Further, if hand > N at end of month (suggest 10), >> another hand-N cards destroyed at random. > > The 1 card auto-discard seems like it would discourage long-term > strategy. Decrease the hand limit to 7, make the surplus-discard by > announcement rather than monthly, and increase the salaries: > Get 3 cards per week minimum salary > + 2 per week (weekly office) > + 2 per month (monthly office) > + one per case if a timely Judge > + 2 * II per adopted proposal Good thinking; I think I prefer no auto-discard. Last time around (with hand limits but no auto-discard), it was frustrating because a player could go inactive while under the hand limit but with a valuable card and it would get stuck for months. But with an infinite deck that's much less of an issue. >> (Frequency) is relative frequency of cards dealt out of 1000 > Punctuation is a good thing > >> action as on a single BASIC ACTION card e names when doin so. > So is spellin. Yeah yeah that's why I didn't even label it a proto :) > This probability distribution feels wrong to me, especially with: >> A player can spend two cards of any type to perform the same >> action as on a single BASIC ACTION card e names when doing so. > > At a basic salary of 3 cards per month, there's little chance of card > cards procedurally jousting with each other. I think it would be better > to remove the basic action cards from the deck entirely and use the > spend-two mechanic exclusively. Perhaps reduce it to spend-one? Or tie > each basic action to a category -- spend a proposal card to > Distrib-u-Matic, a power card to Absolv-o-Matic, or a card card to Roll > Call. This was the hardest part; you're right, I'm still not sure the tweaking is right. I made the distrib-u-matics in particular common because of the recent complaints about distributability; wanted to make sure enough came up so everyone could distribute a proposal a week or so. But your combined solution of less of them plus higher throughput (and lower hand size to encourage use) might solve that nicely. -G.
