On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Roger Hicks<pidge...@gmail.com> wrote:
> In my estimation, the primary cause of the recent lull is not Cards in
> and of itself but it's poor execution. We adopted a card proposal that
> was broken (half the cards did not initially work) and two of the
> primary recordkeepors for cards were vacant/inactive. Proposals are in
> voting now to correct the errors with the cards, and Grand Poobah has
> already been replaced. The current state of all cards can be found on
> my web interface at http://nomic.bob-space.com/agoralog.aspx (note:
> I've put a lot of work into making this a usable resource....please
> use it!).

You could equally well be describing the last time we tried cards.
Some cards didn't have the power to do what they described.  The
initial recordkeepor (Wes, who also authored the cards proposal)
quickly vanished.  G. took over and did an outstanding job, but I
think the office eventually wore em down as well.

> Cards may be an abstraction, yes, but a highly logical one. Most
> everyone has played a card game before and understands the basic
> concepts of how cards work. Any new player attempting to grok the
> ruleset will see terms like "Cards", "Deck", "Hand" and immediately -
> intuitively - understand the basics of how they work. To a new player
> it actually brings some familiarity and logic to what would otherwise
> be a jumbled mess of rules.

Sure, if you mean cards with names like "Ace of Spades" or "Seven of
Hearts".  Most people aren't familiar with cards that have actual text
printed on them (or worse -- loosely associated with them and needing
to be looked up).  I have enough trouble just getting non-gamers to
try Dominion or Guillotine, and those are both pretty light games
apart from having text on the cards.  Perhaps the transition is more
natural for nomic enthusiasts, though.

Also, the abstraction leaks.  In a real card game, much of the point
of the cards is to provide hidden information -- hence the identical
backs.  In fact, a person I know has designed a line of card games
that make use of doubly sided cards, and yet the cards still introduce
hidden information.  A physical game without hidden information
typically does not use cards as components in the first place.  In
Agora, hidden information is hard to do, so we don't bother.  To a
certain extent, this defeats the purpose and makes the cards less
interesting.  Where is the challenge in playing a powerful card if I
know exactly which other players are holding onto the counter for it?

> Ha! Our decks our superior they don't even need shuffled. And I can
> deal 10,000 cards via automated mechanism in the amount of time it
> would take someone to deal one physical card.

So when one needs to draw a card and the deck is empty, one can just
reach over, shuffle the discard pile, and draw one?  No, one has to
wait on the recordkeeper to push the button, or rely on a set of magic
contracts that introduce additional complexity.

>> A player with a physical hand of cards can easily see, at any time, what
>> cards e has.
>
> Again, I refer to http://nomic.bob-space.com/agoralog.aspx

Assuming it's up-to-date.

-root

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