Board Game Arena

As I understand, some of the remaining issues are bound to be about cards with a heat cost.

I think that the heat cost of cards played should be paid first: you should not be allowed to play a boost before having paid for them.
Now I believe that the cost of those cards *can* be paid after using cooling effects whatever the source of the cooling.

I think the rules make it clear enough that you must pay the Heat cost of the played cards if you can.

A problem though is whether someone should be allowed to play a upgrade card if he cannot pay for it.
There clearly are situations where you would want too.
1) because playing an upgrade card degraded into a "+" card is actually the best you can play
2) because playing that card is the only way to avoid a cluttered hand

Personally, I think that neither should be allowed.

I also think there is no contradiction with the cluttered hand rule (at least for the French version I read). The cluttered hand rule states that if you cannot play enough cards then you must play all the cards that you can play and complete with Heat cards. So if we accept that we cannot play upgrade cards that we cannot the heat pay for then the cluttered hand rule remains clear enough.

So the only real problem with cluttered hand would be if you have more than 3 upgrade cards in hand that you cannot play or less than 7 cards in hand. If that was to happen (may be possible in a championship ?), you might have to allow player to play upgrade cards as dead weight (like a heat card) in a cluttered hand. Because in such a scenario in speed 4, you could have 4 unplayable upgrade cards and 3 heat in hand which leaves no solution.

Phoxtrot wrote: ↑24 September 2023, 20:00 As I understand, some of the remaining issues are bound to be about cards with a heat cost.

I think that the heat cost of cards played should be paid first: you should not be allowed to play a boost before having paid for them.
Now I believe that the cost of those cards *can* be paid after using cooling effects whatever the source of the cooling.

I think the rules make it clear enough that you must pay the Heat cost of the played cards if you can.

A problem though is whether someone should be allowed to play a upgrade card if he cannot pay for it.
There clearly are situations where you would want too.
1) because playing an upgrade card degraded into a "+" card is actually the best you can play
2) because playing that card is the only way to avoid a cluttered hand

Personally, I think that neither should be allowed.

I also think there is no contradiction with the cluttered hand rule (at least for the French version I read). The cluttered hand rule states that if you cannot play enough cards then you must play all the cards that you can play and complete with Heat cards. So if we accept that we cannot play upgrade cards that we cannot the heat pay for then the cluttered hand rule remains clear enough.

So the only real problem with cluttered hand would be if you have more than 3 upgrade cards in hand that you cannot play or less than 7 cards in hand. If that was to happen (may be possible in a championship ?), you might have to allow player to play upgrade cards as dead weight (like a heat card) in a cluttered hand. Because in such a scenario in speed 4, you could have 4 unplayable upgrade cards and 3 heat in hand which leaves no solution.

That's indeed what we are discussing with DoW. If you put weather aside, then we agree with them that given a set of selected cards during planification, we can check weither it's a playable set or not, and only allow valid set. And if no such set exist, then that's a cluttered hand.
Now with weather, there is this "1 extra cooldown" thing that just breaks thing apart. Sure, if you only play cards with fixed speed, you can do the same as before. But what about stress ? And what about brakes ? Should we force the player to select a given speed to make sure he lands on that specific sector to have that extra cooldown ?
And not even talking only about cluttered hand here, if I have only 1 heat left and I need to pay 1 heat for my upgrade, am I allowed to boost in the hope of landing in that sector even if I might fail ?

The rulebook is not precise enough about these cases, so DoW has to discuss with the authors to see what would be the best for BGA before we can implement it and put garage and weather out of alpha flag.

Oh yeah, indeed, hadn't thought of the weather cooling.

And yeah, there are multiple ways this could be solved depending on what the author prefers.

1) One would be that if you cannot, in the end, pay for all the cards you played, you would spinout at your starting point (with or without losing all your heat and taking extra stress cards...)
2) or, if you cannot, in the end, pay for all the cards you played, rollback and be considered having a cluttered hand.
3) Another would be to state that the "weather +1 cooling" occurs after paying for cards and therefore cannot be factored in when considering what cards can be played. (But this does not solve the issue of the "no cooling weather" and is quite technical )
4) Or to state that you can only play cards that you are certain to be able to pay for (but that is so error prone...)
5) there could be a world where Heat you cannot pay for are replaced by extra stress cards (but this doesn't really solve the BGA problem, this is more like an error correction for play at the table)
6) Cooldown effect of weather tokens could apply to cars that *starts* their movement in that section of track instead of where the cars are during reaction phase (but that's annoying with the other weather tokens working based on where your car is when you try to use their effect like the tokens affecting slipstream)
7) Remove cards that cost heat when playing with a weather that affects cooldown or heat cost...
8) If you cannot pay, you backtrack and replace the card with a + but you don't backtrack the backtrack if the + changes the situation so that you now could pay the cost. (Note that changing a card into a + is stated in the rules but only for "accidentally" not being able to pay for it so the question remains of what *exactly* is accidental and whether you can do it intentionally if the intention manifests itself only in phase 4. And what exactly does backtrack mean if there is a boost involved (recover heat cost ?). And is there a speed check if a corner is crossed but backtracked ?)

And probably other solutions I cannot foresee (including all the ones with more heavy rule changes).
Edit: added more options

As stated later in the thread, I think that solution 1 is the simplest and the best.
8 is probably technically the closest to the rules but it is not exactly the rules either (there is no backtracking in the rules and nothing about intentionally playing a card that knowingly will or might cause a payment problem) and, for me, it goes against the grain of the design that strives for simplicity.

I am personnaly more in favor of a penalty similar to spinout because even IRL, getting a stress card as a "penalty" is really not that much and can even sometimes be useful. So i would say : let drivers take as much risk as they want, but if they are missing heat to pay during react, then treat them as hard as spinout does.

Tisaac wrote: ↑25 September 2023, 06:49 I am personnaly more in favor of a penalty similar to spinout because even IRL, getting a stress card as a "penalty" is really not that much and can even sometimes be useful. So i would say : let drivers take as much risk as they want, but if they are missing heat to pay during react, them treat them as hard as spinout does.

Yeah, with or without extra stress, I think that a spinout on the starting space makes the most sense.

My family has added a house rule that you must have the heat required to play "heat required card" at the time of play. You are not allowed to cool down to get said heat. However, rules state that you are able to do the fact step in any order you'd like. Making it more family friendly, which I can understand.

Also, I believe I read it somewhere that if a card is played that cannot be paid, it's discarded and a random card is taken for speed from the deck i.e. similarly to stress.

There is a question about boosting around a corner to get to a cool down sector, yes you would be able to do that but if you are unable to afford the the corner then you would spin out.

Gits_N_Shiggles wrote: ↑27 September 2023, 17:31 My family has added a house rule that you must have the heat required to play "heat required card" at the time of play. You are not allowed to cool down to get said heat. However, rules state that you are able to do the fact step in any order you'd like. Making it more family friendly, which I can understand.

Also, I believe I read it somewhere that if a card is played that cannot be paid, it's discarded and a random card is taken for speed from the deck i.e. similarly to stress.

There is a question about boosting around a corner to get to a cool down sector, yes you would be able to do that but if you are unable to afford the the corner then you would spin out.

Why would you spin out ? I see nothing in the rules about that case.

"Why would you spin out ? I see nothing in the rules about that case."

In this case of trying to get to the sector with an extra cooldown, you'd have to go through a corner. If you used your last heat to boost through the corner and were unable to pay for the corner check, that always ends with a spin out (pg 6 - step 7 of play of round). If you get exactly the number you are looking for and can pay for the corner there wouldn't be a spin out.

Gits_N_Shiggles wrote: ↑28 September 2023, 13:59 "Why would you spin out ? I see nothing in the rules about that case."

In this case of trying to get to the sector with an extra cooldown, you'd have to go through a corner. If you used your last heat to boost through the corner and were unable to pay for the corner check, that always ends with a spin out (pg 6 - step 7 of play of round). If you get exactly the number you are looking for and can pay for the corner there wouldn't be a spin out.

But why are you assuming you are overspeeding the corner ? You can boost through a corner at a safe speed.

Surely the rules should ultimately be what is written/intended by the designers though rather than what people think they should be. The rules clearly state that if you play a card you can't play for it turns into the same effect as a stress card effectively, so surely that point shouldn't be up for debate?

So I assume the only point of debate is should you be able to boost if that then would stop you being able to pay for one of your cards, it's certainly against the spirit of the game, but not really covered in the rules, other than assuming you could do this because you can take actions in the React step in any order you like.