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Marking cards

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Dulkal
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Joined: 02/07/2012

I am working on a game that uses an action resolution similar to Warrior Knights: Each player plays a number of action cards into a common stack in the beginning of the round. The stack is then shuffled, and the action cards are turned over one at a time. When a players action card comes up, he takes the action described on the card.

I would like to combine this with a draft mechanism where players can acquire new action cards from a common source.

However, I have gotten stuck trying to figure out an elegant way to recongnize who played a particular action card when it comes up from the action stack. In Warrior Knights, the cards are colored, but that wont work if the players are drafting from a common source.

Any great ideas on how to make cards recognizable in a not-too-fiddly manner?

JustActCasual
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Dry erase seems the easiest,

Dry erase seems the easiest, though it might come off in handling. Sleeves with interior colours is another solution, although that could get fiddly depending on the duration of the game/ # of changes of ownership.

Robinson
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rough ideas for solution

This is a hard one - I'm not terribly happy with either of these suggested solutions, but they are the best I can come up with right now and hopefully they spark someone else who can refine them or come up with a better alternative. Good luck.

1) Draft from a neutral deck (like the random card selectors in Dominion) and have a copy of each card in a color coded deck for each player. From an ease of playing standpoint, this seems best because the players still have an easy color code method of distinguishing cards. The downside is more copies of cards. One way to cut that down would be to have drafting from one of the two colored decks instead of having a separate selector deck. If the person with the other color drafts a card they set it aside and actually use the copy from their own deck.

2) You could require or provide card sleeves and have them insert a thin colored token on neutral cards to show who owns them. Depending on what this is, it might be either too thick and interfere with shuffling or too thin and be too flimsy and fiddly.
2a) You could provide sleeves that have a symbol printed on them or a colored band that is visible only from the front. For example, a border that is black when the card is face down, but red or blue on the face up side.

Grall Ritnos
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Joined: 02/07/2011
Tracking ownership

One other thought would be to have a way for players to prove ownership of certain cards. This may be similar to an above suggestion, but when a player drafts a card, he or she takes two copies of it, one which will be played, and one which can be revealed when a card is about to be resolved to prove that he or she owns the card. If multiple players are able to draft copies of the same functional card, each matched set of cards could have an identifying number to distinguish them (i.e. Thief #3 was just revealed, so only the person holding Thief#3 would be able to claim this card). This could also be done by having players take note of the cards they have drafted on paper. This method seems more prone to error, but would require fewer cards to be printed. Depending on the # of players and the size of the cards, a final option would be to have the card back include a directional indicator, such as an arrow pointing in the direction of the person who played it. This could work for a game with 4 players or less, and would be ideal for a game that could accommodate square cards. Handling the deck would be more fussy, and people would be able to tell who played the card in question before it was revealed, but it would require no additional components. None of these ideas are elegant, but maybe somebody else can improve on them. Good luck!

BubbleChucks
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I think it depends on how

I think it depends on how many cards are added to the draw deck.

If you're talking about a lot of cards its going to be either tricky or costly - repeating every card would mean doubling the number of cards in the game.

You could have a tally board. Each card would have a number or colour code. The tally board would have lines for each card to be drawn and spaces next to it - say 3 for the purpose of this explanation.

Card 1 = O O O
Card 2 = O O O
Card 3 = O O O

... and so on.

You would then have some counters - marked with numbers or colours, depending on which way you want to go. I'll use numbers to explain further, because I can't represent coloured dots here.

Player A adds their first card to the draw deck - which features the unique number 116. So on their tally board they would fill the spaces with counters featuring the numbers 1, 1, 6.

Card 1 = 1 1 6

The coloured variation would work exactly the same - but you would use something like coloured tiddlywink chips or small wooden cubes. In respect to the cards these would show pictures of the coloured cubes (Red Cube, Yellow Cube, Blue Cube) in unique patterns. Eg red, red, yellow / red, yellow, red / blue, yellow, red and so on.

How fiddly it gets depends on the number of cards you need to represent.

kos
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Redefine "shuffle"?

What if you redefine "shuffle", as follows:

Each card is marked with a unique number from 1 to 100.
Each player plays their action card(s) face down in front of them.
Actions are resolved in order of increasing numbers.

So it's not quite the same as shuffling, but it means you don't know for sure what order your action will go off, other than that if you play low numbers they will go off earlier. It also gives a bit of strategy of which actions to play, e.g. if you had two "Winning Smile" cards #22 and #84 in your hand, you could choose which one to play based on whether you wanted to be early or late in the turn order.

Regards,
kos

Dulkal
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Thank you!

Thank you for the replies. A lot of great ideas!

I am already suspecting that 'too many cards' will be one of my main design issues, so I don't think duplicating cards is a viable solution. I also would really like to shy away from solutions that require fiddling every round. A solution that is slighty fiddly only when the card is acquired will be much simpler in the long run.

I thought about using standard colored sleeves, which lead to all manner of problems, but for some reason never thought of marking sleeves on the front. Seems obvious in hindsight, but sometimes it takes other eyes :)

Thank you!

kos wrote:
What if you redefine "shuffle", as follows:

Each card is marked with a unique number from 1 to 100.
Each player plays their action card(s) face down in front of them.
Actions are resolved in order of increasing numbers.

So it's not quite the same as shuffling, but it means you don't know for sure what order your action will go off, other than that if you play low numbers they will go off earlier. It also gives a bit of strategy of which actions to play, e.g. if you had two "Winning Smile" cards #22 and #84 in your hand, you could choose which one to play based on whether you wanted to be early or late in the turn order.

That is an interesting mechanic.

As it is, I have another initiative system that I would like to try out first, but this one is definitely worth keeping in mind as an alternative.

munio
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well if you dont mind working

well if you dont mind working with a honor system, just let each player claim their own card as it flips up, (possibly giving cards with the same name an extra number so you are able to diffrentiate between them)

Dulkal
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munio wrote:well if you dont

munio wrote:
well if you dont mind working with a honor system, just let each player claim their own card as it flips up, (possibly giving cards with the same name an extra number so you are able to diffrentiate between them)


Possible, but I think it will be impractical for players to have to remember all their cards, particularly if they have to remember the specific number of the card. Also, I really like the way the Warrior Knights system always makes it apparent whose turn it is and what is going on. It serves to keep the game moving when it is always visible who should be acting right now.

BenMora
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It sounds like you want the

It sounds like you want the chosen actions to happen in a random order, right? So what if each player draws a card from the neutral deck and keeps the card face down with them so you know which belongs to whom, then use another method to randomly decide who plays theirs first, either by dice, just like you would decide who goes first in most games, or have 1 color-coded token from each player face down in a common area and draw one at a time.

munio
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BenMora wrote:It sounds like

BenMora wrote:
It sounds like you want the chosen actions to happen in a random order, right? So what if each player draws a card from the neutral deck and keeps the card face down with them so you know which belongs to whom, then use another method to randomly decide who plays theirs first, either by dice, just like you would decide who goes first in most games, or have 1 color-coded token from each player face down in a common area and draw one at a time.

expanding on this idea; put a marker on your card with tile a number on each card played (face down) then put the same number in the bag and draw random tiles

Dulkal
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BenMora wrote:It sounds like

BenMora wrote:
It sounds like you want the chosen actions to happen in a random order, right? So what if each player draws a card from the neutral deck and keeps the card face down with them so you know which belongs to whom, then use another method to randomly decide who plays theirs first, either by dice, just like you would decide who goes first in most games, or have 1 color-coded token from each player face down in a common area and draw one at a time.

That would work too. I do suspect, though, that it will be more of an interruption in practice to roll dice and look around for 'who has number 9?' every time an action is played, than to resleeve cards when they are acquired.

I think I'll stick to the front-marked sleeves as a first stab at a solution. Thanks for the suggestions!

Maaartin
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Redefine shuffle - 2

I'd like to elaborate on the idea of "Redefine shuffle" by kos, as I like it a lot. One variant:

Let both players shuffle their own cards and keep them in front of them. Use a player-coded stack of cards containing as the same amount of cards as each player uses and shuffle them. I'm afraid I need an example:

  • Black player uses 3 cards, let's call them 1, 2, and 3. She shuffles and places them in front of her.
  • Let's assume her cards are shuffled like 231.
  • While player uses 2 cards, let's call them 4 and 5. She does the same.
  • Let's assume her cards are shuffled like 54.
  • A stack of 3 cards denoting the black player ("B") and 2 cards denoting the white player ("W").
  • Let's assume they get shuffled like BWWBB.

Now the first one and the last two cards get taken from the black's stack, i.e., the resulting order is 25431. This is not as simple as kos' idea, but still quite simple and it provides exactly the original shuffling (as I understand it).

Shoe
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Shuffle the Players?

What if, instead of shuffling the cards you, shuffled the players? At the start of each round, have the players also randomly draft face down what position they will have in the turn order? AFter they choose thier draft, have the players each reveal thier number that determines who goes first and then have them reveal/resolve the card they chose according to that order?

NASG
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Tokens rather than sleeves or card artwork.

(I've just read this thread quite quickly, so apologies if I'm repeating someone else, this is a bit like Shoe's response, only every action is randomly determined, not just the order of players)..

It seems that the original idea was to have people's actions happen in a random order but to enable actions from a commonly shared deck, so colour coding won't work.

Rather than code the cards why not have each player use a number of coloured tokens, which are placed in a bag, one token per action played. The players place the action cards face down in front of them. A nominated player then draws the tokens from the bag one at a time, and the corresponding player takes an action.

If you want the actions to occur randomly (as well as the player order) then get someone else to choose which face down action is played.

It would mean you wouldn't have to mark cards individually, or play about with sleeves.
HTH

Shoe
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more or less what I said, but

more or less what I said, but with tokens instead of cards....seems like the best method to do what you want

Black Oak Games
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Second Shoe

I second Shoe's idea, then it's just 6 more cards in the game, numbered 1-6, to determine player order. Pretty cheap and fast.

I did also like Kos' idea, for different purposes. I would add that the final card drawn, after all of the players have drawn, would be the starting point (so it's not always starting at 1).

Procylon
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Rather than shuffle the cards

Rather than shuffle the cards together, everyone could lay their card down and roll dice to determine play order.

Dulkal
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Using tokens to determine

Using tokens to determine play order could work. It would even have the advantage of allowing players to determine the internal order between their orders. In practice, however, I am not sure it would be any less fiddly. The advantage of the sleeve solution is that it is fiddly only at the time of acquisition, while a token system is fiddly all the time.

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