Additional pre-planning Opportunities

[theH0FF]

Loving this implementation of a game I love to play but find tough to make happen in person.

I think there may be some additional places to implement pre-planned responses or count down timers to help avoid the game stalling out. I just learned about the bell icons for alerts on the action cards which I hope will avoid having to always say I don’t want to sabotage someone else’s action cards which. I appreciate being able to preplan whether I will do the secondary of a strategy card but I often know going into the action phase a round which Secondaries I intend to follow and would be happy to indicate for some of them I definitely will / will not be doing them ahead of time. Also, in other games when you have a response window or confirm a move it gives a count down and if you don’t make a choice it defaults to ‘pass this timing window’ or confirm move which may help too.

[GTSchemer]

Loving this implementation of a game I love to play but find tough to make happen in person.

I think there may be some additional places to implement pre-planned responses or count down timers to help avoid the game stalling out. I just learned about the bell icons for alerts on the action cards which I hope will avoid having to always say I don’t want to sabotage someone else’s action cards which. I appreciate being able to preplan whether I will do the secondary of a strategy card but I often know going into the action phase a round which Secondaries I intend to follow and would be happy to indicate for some of them I definitely will / will not be doing them ahead of time. Also, in other games when you have a response window or confirm a move it gives a count down and if you don’t make a choice it defaults to ‘pass this timing window’ or confirm move which may help too.

A countdown would almost certainly be rejected, because 3-5 minutes for a turn in a real-time game already leads to some players going slightly over time as they learn the interface, or make a complicated choice. Imagine having an automatic decision made for you because you took too long to click, 5 hours into a game! It would be heartbreaking.

For your Sabotage case, you might be interested in the Alerts tab. If you an interested you can turn off the bell on the Sabotage card, then manually created an alert for "When" an action card is played, which allows you to bluff having Sabotage. Or, you can create an alert like this, but specifically say only wake you if the action card "involves" you. This means an attack card on someone else will not wake you up, but an attack card against you will do so.

For passing strategy card secondaries, you can click the strategy card icons on the scoreboard (or in another player's play area, or in the All Strategy Cards dialog) and turn off the bell if you are definitely sure you will skip the secondary that round. They will automatically turn back on for the next round.

For TAKING a secondary automatically, circumstances can change a lot, so allowing a player to accept a secondary several moves in advance, instead of just waking once and simultaneously making the decision along with other players, might not save much time, and might lead to severe misplays. So this is unlikely to happen.

[CJAX8]

One additional idea for pre-planning would be strategy card selection. Sometimes I'm going second or third and I value a certain strategy card above any of the others. There could be an option for "Choose X if available."

It wouldn't be a huge time savings but also maybe wouldn't be that hard to implement?

A more advanced version of this would be ranking the available strategy cards before your turn and it picking the highest preference from what's available. Example: I'm going fourth and rank cards 1. Tech, 2. Leadership, 3. Trade, 4. Warfare. Tech, Leadership, and Imperial get taken before me so then it auto-picks my highest choice from what's available: Trade

[GTSchemer]

One additional idea for pre-planning would be strategy card selection. Sometimes I'm going second or third and I value a certain strategy card above any of the others. There could be an option for "Choose X if available."

It wouldn't be a huge time savings but also maybe wouldn't be that hard to implement?

A more advanced version of this would be ranking the available strategy cards before your turn and it picking the highest preference from what's available. Example: I'm going fourth and rank cards 1. Tech, 2. Leadership, 3. Trade, 4. Warfare. Tech, Leadership, and Imperial get taken before me so then it auto-picks my highest choice from what's available: Trade

If I recall correctly, this was discussed and the publisher did not approve it.

As you say, the time savings is small, and strategy card decisions are extremely critical, so players only pick after they see other picks.