Text abilities, evaluating potential, a pain in board game design

I always found strategy video game more fun and convenient to design than board games. One of the reason might be that video game design is mostly based on numbers while board games design is mostly based on text.

The reason video game is based on number is that basing it on text would demand to have unique code for each element of the gameusing text abilities. While if you use numbers you give everybody the same template and you use the same code to handle all your game elements using that template.

One thing that bothers me int text ability design is distribution of ability potential.

For example, if you have a unit stat with value ranging from 1 to 10, you know that the potential lies between 1 and 10. You can distribute all the values and actually dress up an inventory of which value is used more often than others so that in the end, all numbers are almost all used evenly. If you don't use all the numbers then you lose some potential. So for example, if you do not use number 6-8, that is some lost potential, you game could handle those numbers but you decided not to use them, or you never thought of using them.

For for number it's easy, but for text abilities it gets more complicated to avoid losing potential. Let say you have a game with a hand of cards, a deck of cards, cards in play and a discard pile. And you want to make abilities only related to the position of the cards regardless of the cards contents. You first need to calculate all the possible abilities permutations like this:

Add a card into play
- From hand
- From top X card of deck (draw X and chose 1), From middle of deck (search for a card)
- from discard pile

Add a card to discard pile
- From play
- From deck (with all permutation above)
- from hand

Add a card to hand
- From play
- From deck (with all permutation above)
- from discard

Those abilities can be applied to yourself or to your opponent which double the possibilities. Which means approximately 2 dozens of permutations. So first you need to dress up a list like the above of all the abilities. Then you have to remove abilities that would be pointless to use. For example, if drawing a card to your hand is a good thing, you will never make your opponent draw card.

When you have a list you could easily make an inventory of the cards using each ability so that you know if some abilities are used more often than others allowing you to keep track of lost potential. It's the same way as inventoring used values.

The only drawback is that it's possible to miss some ability text or variations, meaning that there is already some lost potential you are not awared of. So you might be asking, is there a need to do all this work. The advantages I could see are:

- Determine the size of the area of effect. If you need a lot of unique abilities, you need to know if you have enough text ability permutations and the only way to know it is by listing them.

- Avoid repetition. I you can have a dozen of different abilities and end up using only the same 3 , not only you are losing potential, but your abilities becomes repetetive and less unique making your game less interesting.

The main disadvantages area

- Painful operation to do, reduce the interest to design the game

- Possibility to miss some abilites.

Some of you might way, don't bother with it and use what ou need as you improvise. But the lack of planning could create at the end a lost potential, or you could realize that you do not have enough permutation possible.

Is there other methods or solutions to deal with text ability that could make the design process easier to handle.