Board Game Arena

Hi everyone,
Hope you're having fun with Colt Express !

A player has suggested that I display card counts for every player (in the expert variant at least), ie how many cards they have in their respective deck, hand and discard.

It can be done, but I'd like some input from the community :
- would you find it useful ?
- is it overreaching for a game that's supposed to be quite lightweight ?
- it would use one more line in the players' panels, thus pushing the logs down, would this be an issue ?

It may be relevant to point that 20% of the games are being played with the expert variant, and half of those are 2-player games (where you're forced to use that variant). Of course this ratio is likely to increase when people start to know the game better.

I am having great fun with the game - perhaps once of the best conversions on the site!

In terms of card count I suppose it would simulate the ability to actually see your decks when playing in RL however in all my plays over the last 48 hours I don't recall ever feeling like I needed that information...

If there were potential changes I would much rather see an undo/confirm option for your card selections although I realize that gets cumbersome... Several times I have selected a card and then immediately wanted to change it, alas... no dice Perhaps that is part of the game.

Also it would be great to have a hover message for what the cards in your hand do... Every time I host a room with a new person someone has asked about that.

Thanks again for all the fun!

Dave

LtSterling wrote:If there were potential changes I would much rather see an undo/confirm option for your card selections although I realize that gets cumbersome...

Yeah, having to click twice for every card would get boring after half a game.
Here again, I think it's more in the spirit of this game to learn to deal with your mistakes than to overthink your moves.

LtSterling wrote:Also it would be great to have a hover message for what the cards in your hand do... Every time I host a room with a new person someone has asked about that.

Rules have been posted in 7 languages, along with 3 videos, but people still tend to forget that they have to take at least a quick look at the rules before starting a game on BGA, and I don't want to encourage laziness
In some games it can be hard to memorize the effect of every single card, but here there's a whooping total of 6 distinct actions, half of them very straightforward, I'm sure everyone can make the effort.

Feel free to edit http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/index. ... ction=edit, it will be displayed at the bottom of every table (if you don't I'll probably do it eventually).

LOL - that is exactly what I said to a good friend - "you can't memorize 6 symbols??"

All good points that I frankly can't argue with... Thanks for the quick response!!

At least for NEWBIES would be good to put the cards and the action with this card xD.

Also (for newbies too), the game can explain the phase symbol of each round (tunnel, normal, u-turn, and double turn)

I'm a firm believer that the BGA experience should mimic the physical experience as close as possible. (Granted, the frustration of doing all the maintenance tasks is one thing I don't miss... ) But, in the physical game, you can't see how many cards a player has -- they're stacked on the board. You can see if they have 1, a couple, or several, but it is hard to tell the difference between 6 or 7 cards. If you want to list how many cards they have, I'd suggest ranges.

I would find the count of kept cards at the end of a round very useful as to what the intentions of each player is for the next round.
But I agree with Jest, it wouldn't be realistic if you were to show all card counts at all times. And it'd waste precious space if you were to add a line on each player's panel.
So a good solution would be to list in the logs how many cards were kept by each player. Like this:
Quinarbre kept 2 card(s), LtSterling kept 0, Oso kept 1

Logs shouldn't provide exclusive information, but it already is the case, as it's the only way to know what the last player of the round played (the animation turning the cards around starts too early).

pikiou wrote:A good solution would be to list in the logs how many cards were kept by each player.

pikiou wrote:Logs are the only way to know what the last player of the round played (the animation turning the cards around starts too early).

Both valid points, and indeed more realistic than tracking every deck's size. Fixes scheduled for next release.