Hello!
I finally decided to stop by and write about this.
Lost Cities is a great game, and it’s such a huge bummer that its implementation on BGA leaves so much to be desired. Much more complex games have better adaptations, so it’s absolutely not beyond the technical means of BGA to make this game better.
There are plenty of things that could be done, but I want to focus on just 2 things that boggle my mind:
1.
Allow Undo within a player’s turn
This is just a no-brainer. A turn in Lost Cities has 2 actions: play a card, draw a card. And to play a card, the tap target areas are incredibly close together. Especially on mobile, it’s absolutely common to mistap and discard the card to the middle row instead of playing it to your expedition. This can outright lose you the game! It absolutely should be addressed.
Being able to Undo your card play is the first obvious way to address this issue, but it doesn’t even need to be that. You could also:
- make the tap targets harder to confuse;
- make the tap targets more spaced apart;
- allow a player to move the just-played card between the middle row and the expedition column before they draw a card;
- have a confirmation prompt pop-up to make sure they want to play the card to the middle row.
Plenty of ways to address this issue. But it needs to be addressed.
2.
Fix the orphan!
In typographic layout, there’s a term for when a text is laid out in such a way that the last line consists of only a single short word: that word is an orphan. And we don’t want to have orphans.
In Lost Cities, you always have 8 cards in your hand, and in the BGA implementation of Lost Cities, you always have a row of 7 cards and the 8th card is an orphan, on a line of its own. For absolutely no reason.
I play mostly on mobile, and the first time I encountered this issue I was like “oh, okay, my phone screen is narrow, I’ll turn my phone sideways to give it more space”. And then I did. And the orphan was still there!! I had to laugh. This is so stupid.
The first point above is more important, but I’d say this second point is more urgent, because it’s so wild that it’s happening.
Just narrow the space between the cards a tiny little bit so the 8th card fits in the same row! Or, perhaps better yet! Make it so you have 2 rows of four cards!!
C’mon. I know that nothing in software development is nearly as easy to fix as people think it is. But even considering a fix for this would be 5x harder than one would assume, it would still not be too hard. Even if it’s 10x!
———
Anyway, I really didn’t mean to turn this into a rant. Apologies. I really just wanted to make two suggestions to vastly improve the implementation of this great little game. Hopefully they can at least be read and considered.
Thank you for reading.
I finally decided to stop by and write about this.
Lost Cities is a great game, and it’s such a huge bummer that its implementation on BGA leaves so much to be desired. Much more complex games have better adaptations, so it’s absolutely not beyond the technical means of BGA to make this game better.
There are plenty of things that could be done, but I want to focus on just 2 things that boggle my mind:
1.
Allow Undo within a player’s turn
This is just a no-brainer. A turn in Lost Cities has 2 actions: play a card, draw a card. And to play a card, the tap target areas are incredibly close together. Especially on mobile, it’s absolutely common to mistap and discard the card to the middle row instead of playing it to your expedition. This can outright lose you the game! It absolutely should be addressed.
Being able to Undo your card play is the first obvious way to address this issue, but it doesn’t even need to be that. You could also:
- make the tap targets harder to confuse;
- make the tap targets more spaced apart;
- allow a player to move the just-played card between the middle row and the expedition column before they draw a card;
- have a confirmation prompt pop-up to make sure they want to play the card to the middle row.
Plenty of ways to address this issue. But it needs to be addressed.
2.
Fix the orphan!
In typographic layout, there’s a term for when a text is laid out in such a way that the last line consists of only a single short word: that word is an orphan. And we don’t want to have orphans.
In Lost Cities, you always have 8 cards in your hand, and in the BGA implementation of Lost Cities, you always have a row of 7 cards and the 8th card is an orphan, on a line of its own. For absolutely no reason.
I play mostly on mobile, and the first time I encountered this issue I was like “oh, okay, my phone screen is narrow, I’ll turn my phone sideways to give it more space”. And then I did. And the orphan was still there!! I had to laugh. This is so stupid.
The first point above is more important, but I’d say this second point is more urgent, because it’s so wild that it’s happening.
Just narrow the space between the cards a tiny little bit so the 8th card fits in the same row! Or, perhaps better yet! Make it so you have 2 rows of four cards!!
C’mon. I know that nothing in software development is nearly as easy to fix as people think it is. But even considering a fix for this would be 5x harder than one would assume, it would still not be too hard. Even if it’s 10x!
———
Anyway, I really didn’t mean to turn this into a rant. Apologies. I really just wanted to make two suggestions to vastly improve the implementation of this great little game. Hopefully they can at least be read and considered.
Thank you for reading.
