Gameplay Issues (Oct 24 2025)

While working on the game, I found some issues with the game's design, and I found solutions to most of them.

First is the areas you visit each turn. My original plan was you shuffle a deck of 6 cards, and each card names 2 areas that you visit. But then it just sounded bad, because if one of the cards shows 2 areas you have no cards in, you were screwed. This also meant you can try to remember every single card that's come up so far, and what's left in the deck, and this also seemed bad. Now my solution is: at the start of the game you get 3 tokens for each area. Each turn, you spend 2 of those tokens and visit those areas. When you run out of an area token, you can't visit that area anymore. I think this is clearly better.

It turns out that moving cards around can have rules issues. I have a couple ideas for cards that have abilities when you play another card into the same area as them. But then what happens if card A moves one of those kinds of cards into the same area as card A, does that moved card trigger? I think it has to be a yes there. Then there's moving cards when you visit an area. If visiting an area causes you to move a card from another area to the area you're visiting, does that moved card trigger? It sounds like a yes, but I have to be careful here as it could cause loops (I move a card out of the area, then I move it back, those abilities now trigger infinitely).

Then there's the issue of not having enough control over what cards you play. This is sort of a baked in issue with the whole game of bluffing with face down cards, but for this type of game I think it'll be more apparent because the point is to find combos among your cards. One idea I have is, you start the game with (just one) delay token. When you are about to play a card, you can choose to delay it to the end of the game. Instead of playing it right now, you will play it after all 6 rounds, and afterwards you'll also get another chance to visit an area. This also helps if you play a late-game card super early, as instead of it being bad for you, it could be quite good for you.

Then I think, maybe this player interaction thing where you give cards to another player isn't a good fit at all. It certainly takes a while to resolve (both in deciding what card to put face down, and reading the cards you're given), and I'm sure there will be players who wouldn't enjoy the loss of control (they'd rather just play whatever's in their hand). But I don't want to completely remove it, as it's filling 2 important roles: player interaction (some people are fine with multiplayer solitaire games where you don't interact with other players until you compare scores at the end, but I prefer interaction throughout); and card balancing (the loss of control over what you play means the cards don't need to be as balanced as compared to something like Battery RAM). Which means I would have to find another mechanic that also addresses both issues, and this is difficult.

While I think on this, maybe I will start that new fighting game I mentioned. The one where in phase one you can only do things that affect you, and in phase two you can only do things that affect the other player. A lot of the online stuff I figured out for this game will carry over to that game, so it's not like the past month of work was worthless. And I don't think that game will have any blocking issues, other than making cards.