Empty clues are awful

[smallman]

These empty clues have reached epidemic levels on BGA. They have become very common when there is 8 clues or have a full hand, and its a TOTAL waste of a valuable clue, and therefore has zero logic.

The silly arguement for using empty clues is so that noone mistakes a forced clue to be a finesse. This should never be a problem, as people should take notice if forced to give a clue, and treat that clue differently. Just have to be much more careful about what clue to give that should still be seen as useful and not a finesse, unless all could see a clearer non finesse option, which means it really is a finesse.

[Blacktango]

Giving empty clues means giving clues only at the right moment (= if it's not, better discard or give an empty clue).
This allows the clues to have a very precise meaning, and the moves to be predictable.

If you are allowed to mark a card that is not playable and doesn't need to be saved, how do you know if the clue is "meaningless" or if it should trigger a play? Even if you read it carefully, because 8 tokens were available, you can't know.

Also, "blank" clues are not totally useless, as they give interesting negative information about the card of the hand.

Except for saving a 2 on chop, which is very valuable but "not allowed" on BGA, I don't think forcing to mark a card is useful.

There is another case, where no playable card is drawn for a while, and players just have to discard and discard until they find a card to unlock the game. But even here, if you start to marking cards, you risk locking the hands if you draw unique cards after that.

[Romain672]

I've tried by the past to first give empty clue when I was at 8 clues, then when the board was known not useful give weird clue to save extra cards, but it didn't worked.

In some games, you will spend 1/2/3 turns in a row wasting clues for nothing, which make the end game really hard.

If you are allowed to mark a card that is not playable and doesn't need to be saved, how do you know if the clue is "meaningless" or if it should trigger a play? Even if you read it carefully, because 8 tokens were available, you can't know.

Hgroup do that:
- if the focus of the clue is in first slot, then it got normal meaning
- if it isn't, it's more complicated: if there was for both player a 'better' clue to give then that clue will be assumed to be 'as effecient' than this 'better' clue (ie maybe a play). If there was none, then it could be a "8 clues save" which let you save any card in the hand (outside of slot 1).

It's complicated, seem not adapted for bga, but it work well.


Since multiplayer bga games don't play much with context, it's really hard to come with conventions/logic which cover the differents cases, while still being simple.

[Wreckage]

When reading the title "Empty clues are awful" I expected to disagree. But after reading Smallman's post, I agree with everything he's saying. The way bga currently uses an empty clue to tell nothing, is a total waste. I understand it gives neg info, but it’s mostly useless. His point is (if I understand it correctly), that your rules for finesse should change in a forced clue situation, and be able to give “any” useful information, without triggering a play.

Many players will be against this because they want to keep the efficiency of finesse available. But in these situations, the team is being inefficient anyway, by lack of playable cards. So in these situations, you are actually less efficient sticking to your normal clue restrictions. So, when you have a full hand or 8 tokens, any card you touch doesn’t mean play unless it’s color or left card. Seems logical.

You can only do this with players that play together regularly. The general population of bga cannot implement any idea. There's just too many people.

I’d like to note, this thread seems to be only discussing the value of wasting a token in forced clue situations. It’s not discussing the use of empty clues as a regular play or save convention.

[Malo77]

To avoid empty clues, maybee we could reuse hgroup ideas?

I try to resume here:

When you are in a forced clue situation (full hand, 8 tokens, flambs...)
You should use "Stall Clues":
- 1 cluing a card slot 1 to make play / finesse / bluff
- 2 saving any 5: "5 Stall"
- 3 cluing already clued card to make them play "Tempo Clue Stall"
- 4 filing already clued card with extra info "Fill-in Clue"
- 4 saving any card on chop: "Locked Hand Save"
- 4 saving any card not on slot 1 if you have 8 clue tokens: "8 Clue Save"
- 5 reclue an unplayable card, usually a 5: "hard burn"

I would resume/simplify:
if in a "forced to clue" situation:
- clue a 1st slot card to do a normal play.
- else do a save on any other slot, consider 5s first, then chops, then any card not in 1st slot: Special: this does not trigger any play
- else reclue to make play

This seems better than a basic wasted empty clue.

[Travis Hall]

To avoid empty clues, maybee we could reuse hgroup ideas?

Hgroup has a system in place that allows them to specify fairly precisely what conventions are in use in their games. Without that, a lot of what they use becomes far too dangerous. Here, it would result in a lot of misfires.

And honestly, I often find useful clues to give when I have 8 tokens (or a locked hand). Even if there aren’t any playable cards or regular saves to give, those empty clues can contain a lot of useful info if people would start paying attention to them.

If you do want to start using a convention to allow more useful clues to be given in such a situation, you could consider adding an empty clue convention for those in the know, that would simply convey no meaning to those who don’t know it, and thus will not cause misfires. Like, if A has 8 tokens, and clues an empty number to C, it means that A wants C to discard, and B should also clue in order to allow that to happen. This would allow the team to more often discard trash or low-value cards and keep high-value cards in play for longer, or to remove one copy when two of the same card are visible.

[smallman]

The beauty of hanabi is the pure logic. If prefer contrived conventions, should play on hanab.live but should keep bga pure logic.

[BusError]

That explains a lot.

[Stroom]

Empty clues still carry some information. Read between the lines. It means that some of your marked cards can't be the specific number or color. So it has some future relevance that you might have to remember. It would be worse to mark some card that clogs up the hand in the long run and might not be necessary.

Sure, you should not use them in normal situation but don't ban a move just because you don't like it. The more options there are, the more complex moves you can make to be the most efficient.

I mostly play 2p and there empty clues are quite common. The most important thing there is to manage the flow of the game. Conventions can get on the way, sometimes it's better to follow instincts or to remember more than just the last 1-2 moves by the partner. Negative clues matter,