Just some comments on these options:
> 1. Destroy extras - The current system. If you have too many cards the > extras are randomly destroyed. This requires a lot of extra work on > the Dealors part, and also makes it difficult for players to 'store > up' cards for certain purposes. > > 2. Prevent draws - Players don't earn draws when their hand is full. > This gets messy when it becomes difficult to determine who owns which > cards, and since cards have 4 different recordkeepers it may be a > frequent problem. First, a question for you: Given your automation, was I wrong to separate out three recordkeepers for basic decks? It looks like one high-priority office could handle these (though Major Arcana - concerned with the speaker - and Salary switches - could be tracked separately). The old system was a mix of the above two. Players earned "pending draws" which could only be satisfied if your hand limit was below the limit. (In addition, powerful cards could actually take more than one "card slot" in the hand, adding to strategy). If you had too many cards in your hand, you held your pending draws until you didn't. Pending draws built up like currencies. They were never made tradeable, but players would offer pending draws, e.g. "I pledge to transfer you whatever card I get from my Nth pending draw". (The attempt to make draws tradeable broke cards for the umpteenth time, which is when we repealed the whole edifice). Periodically (quarterly or less) there was a general reset in which all cards except 1-2 were (randomly by dealer) discarded, so a whole set of new cards could be drawn from the pending draw pool. In between those resets, you could discard and draw and play and get the killer hand. It took some fiddling to get the balance right between draw rate, hand limit, and reset frequency, but it did reach a reasonable balance between strategy and reasonable game reset rate. The key was that all cards came out of one deck with one tracker; we chose this time to prefer the added strategy of allowing choice of decks to draw from. If we re-unify the dealer into a single office this could still work, though. I wanted to go with that system, but it seemed (at the time) incompatible with three decks. But if those three decks all had the same dealer... -G.
