Why are you allowed to look at draw decks??

[marac408]

I don't understand why this BGA implentation of GWT allows you to look at your draw deck AND the deck of your opponents. The whole reason you have to use the exchange token, is because you don't know what's coming up in your deck. Also, to be able to see what is in your opponents draw deck is totally against the rules. Whenever I've played this on BGA, we have just made a gentleman's agreement not to look at the draw decks. The only deck you are allowed to examine is your discard pile. This should be fixed, or at least we should be given the option to not be able to peek at these decks. Thanks.

[robinzig]

When playing turn based, I regularly look at the contents of my own draw deck in order to judge the odds of drawing what I need. This does not tell you anything that you wouldn't already know from careful tracking of your deck (which is tedious), so I don't see the problem.

It does NOT tell you what is on top of your deck and will therefore be drawn next - this would of course be illegal. It just tells you the composition and therefore what you might draw and with what probability.

I've yet to see a reason to look at an opponent's deck but likewise the cards in their decks are public knowledge in theory so again I don't see a problem.

[VKV FR]

Hi,

I have looked at the game rules. There is sentence in the last section of the rule book "General notes and special cases", that reads: "You are allowed to look through the cards of your personal discard pile at any time. You are not allowed to look at the cards of your personal draw stack.". This statement is consistent with the fact that the discard pile is face-up, and the draw pile is face-down. It's also consistent (for the physical game) with the fact that it's difficult to look through a pile without knowing or changing the card order, and therefore the next card(s) to be drawn.
In conclusion, the rule book is in favor of marac408's opinion.

That being said, the information about your own draw pile can be deduced - at a significant cost - from other information: the contents of your hand and of your discard pile and by remembering the cards you have already acquired (which is summarized in player's score cards on the top right, and can also be deduced from the game logs): the content of your draw pile is everything you own but that is not visible.
In a physical game, the same information would be available if you remember or write down the cards you acquire.
My personal opinion is that it's a nice helper feature to have that, like other ones (the different counters in the score card, the automated calculation of the value of your hand, etc.). That makes the game more confortable to play, and easier for beginners - and again, it just ease a calculation that is already possible to make from your source.

More importantly, to suppress that information in a consistent way, other helper counters should be removed too: acquired cattle cards (3, 4, 5) in particular. One could think of a "no helper" option of the game, where some things are not computed or displayed anymore. There is already an option to deactivate the score in real-time (but most of it can be computed from visible elements, so again it's just more cumbersome), this would be another one - one that I would not choose, but again this is my personal opinion.

However, my opinion is slightly different about the the draw piles of your opponents. As their hands are not visible, it's not possible in a physical game to know what remains in their draw pile.
Also, I actually don't see the benefits of having that information. Knowing the cards owned by a player is useful to estimate its score, but I see no value in knowing their draw pile.
So I would support a change in the implementation to remove the display of content of opponent's draw piles.

VKV

[docthib]

Hi,
I think arguments have nicely been summarized by robinzig and VKV FR

This suggestion has been raised some time ago here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=61566
Feel free to upvote

[MoiMagnus]

I mostly agree that there should be an option to hide those, however I fundamentally disagree with two of the arguments before:

The whole reason you have to use the exchange token, is because you don't know what's coming up in your deck.

Absolutely not. Knowing the content of your deck (even without knowing its order) makes the exchange tokens better. You can actually estimate how likely it is that it will improve your hands, and IRL I never ever use an exchange token without first looking through my discard pile to deduce what is in my deck. Using the exchange token when your deck is full of cards you already have in hand is a waste.

This statement is consistent with the fact that the discard pile is face-up, and the draw pile is face-down. It's also consistent (for the physical game) with the fact that it's difficult to look through a pile without knowing or changing the card order, and therefore the next card(s) to be drawn.

I don't think I agree with this logic. In a physical game, you can't see the content of your deck without seeing its order, so of course you're not allowed to check it. The rules could say something along the line of "you can look at your deck but you need to shuffle it afterward", but I've never seen a rulebook that say this [despite having seen peoples do so in multiple different boardgames in practice], probably because making a perfect shuffle can be quite long so it slows the game. In a digital game, this justification falls appart: it's totally possible for you to look at the content of deck without having access to its order.

That's the same thing for tracking score. The main reason why a lot of games only sum up points at the end is that it is annoying to keep track of points during the play, and it's very easy to make mistakes when doing so. Those reasons disappear when playing on a digital game.

Obviously, just because there are less justifications doesn't mean that there are none. Especially with limited time, memory (for deck content) and the capacity to quickly evaluate who's winning (for score) are skills. And it's up do each and everyone to determine if they think they are skills that are important to the game, or if it's ok to sacrifice those skills for Quality of Life improvements.

[Patrick of the Isles]

Everything is ultimately subjective, and folks should play whatever format they enjoy. To share my perspective:

A player cannot see the cards in their opponents' draw pile. What they can see is the collection of cards in their opponents' hand and draw pile combined (but not what is in each location separately). This does not provide any non-public information - it is merely the direct consequence of the public actions of gaining cards and discarding cards.

If this information were not readily accessible, the player would just need to scroll through the game log if they were concerned they had forgotten the cards the opponent had in their deck. This would be relatively quick, but somewhat tedious to do multiple times over the course of the game.

For that reason many of us who are GWT enthusiasts urged Docthib to design his brilliant implementation with the understanding that information that is public - in the sense of happening publicly and being in the game log - should be easily accessible. A different design principle would not have changed the information available, it would only increase tedium and waste the player's time in locating that information.

Artificially limiting the information that a player can see in order to emphasize the importance of memory does not appeal to me at all, but of course I accept that it may well appeal to others. But in a game of public actions, one would only make the information slightly more tedious to find.

[Posti]

Also, I actually don't see the benefits of having that information. Knowing the cards owned by a player is useful to estimate its score, but I see no value in knowing their draw pile.
So I would support a change in the implementation to remove the display of content of opponent's draw piles.

It can be quite relevant, here's a few scenarios;

• Can opponent afford action X?
  - Does he need to take an extra $ action before worker market or do I need to prioritize it?
  - Do I build tax building to "ruin" his immediate loop?
• Decision whether or not to prolong the game (ie. I can select hazard/tent instead of head "forcing" my opponent into a final delivery)

You get the gist of it

Artificially limiting the information that a player can see in order to emphasize the importance of memory does not appeal to me at all, but of course I accept that it may well appeal to others. But in a game with a public log - as every game on BGA has - it is not possible to make that public information unavailable, it would only be possible to make it slightly more tedious to find.

Seconded

[donkeykong66]

I would like to point out that Jaipur has an implementation where log lines disappear. So you are only able to see the log lines between your last move and the your current one.

I think this question has come up in many settings and many different games (draw decks, displaying scores that would be hidden in real games (think 7 Wonders, Agricola), displaying money in St. Petersburg, and probably tons of other games). I would personally prefer if game implementations are as close to the "in person experience" as possible. So if I were to play a realtime game of GWT, I would not prefer this information to be available. Yes, technically everything is available in the log, but in reality you don't have enough time to track or replay all of that. However, for turnbased games I do agree that this is not an issue, as you'll always have enough time to recover this. I think that's why it would be good to have this behind a toggle (like Saint Petersburg has for example), which would suit both use cases.

But overall, as brought up before, having everything available in the logs means you can't fully get the same experience as playing in person anyway, except if the same choice is made like Jaipur with disappearing log lines. In the meantime, I think this is a fair compromise (especially for turnbased games), but putting the option behind a toggle (so table administrators can choose whether or not looking at decks is allowed) is something that I see no real harm in either.

[Patrick of the Isles]

The key fact that I want to make sure is clear for folks who may come upon this thread later is that in this implementation no information is public that is not public in the first place. Some people may misunderstand and think that the order of a players deck is viewable, or that what is in an opponent's hand is viewable. Either of those things would provide non-public information and so would change the questions that the game poses to the player.

Rather, this discussion of public decisions remaining public on later turns is only a question of whether players' should be tested on their memory. Is that an interesting part of a game or merely an undesirable and degenerate function of most people not having a notepad with them in real life? That is entirely a question of personal preference.

On that question, a user on BoardGameGeek made a comment years ago that I have come around to largely agreeing with:

No hidden trackable information. If it is trackable with pencil and paper then almost without exception I'll play it open. Making such hidden trackable information open doesn't change the logical definition of the game. Example cases include an open Castillo in El Grande, open hands in Settlers of Catan (I know about the thief not being trackable), open money in Container (and most other games), Tigris & Euphrates with open cubes, Acquire with open shares etc. The realisation that I could potentially make a better decision if only I'd tracked (whatever) is an excellent means of persuading me to either not to play that game again, or to only play it with open information in future.

[Phoxtrot]

I would like to point out that Jaipur has an implementation where log lines disappear. So you are only able to see the log lines between your last move and the your current one.

Note that limiting the log isn't enough:
- players can keep notes & screenshots
- players can do a "replay from" and then edit the address bar of the replay to replay from further ago than possible by directly clicking in the log. (this worked last time I tried on a different game and I guess it would require coding at framework level to prohibit this)