On the weekend, I thought I'd try out the new game mechanics to build a board game my friends and I have found a lot of fun playing in person, Discworld: Ankh Morpork.
I found I could do pretty much everything needed to operate the game and have played 2 games with friends so far on the board, but there are a handful of problems that we ran into that seem perhaps easy to implement to improve the mechanics, so I thought I might suggest them.
As a summary of the below, my suggestions are:
Adding a method to click played cards on the table to view them, and/or setting a default size in feet for cards to appear on the board.
Allow players to take/control cards that they didn't play onto the table.
For each card, add a numeric sort order value that allows you to create stacked or ordered decks via shuffling
Read on to see why I think they could be useful and how they could be implemented easily.
The first deals with cards played on the table. They appear to have a fixed size regardless of the size of the source images and they appear at a size relative to your zoom level (playing a card at 100% zoom plays a bigger card on the table than playing at 40% zoom). This wouldn't be so bad if you could also click the cards to view them on the table like you can while they are in your hand or on top of the deck, but you can't, forcing you to change your zoom level to read cards with smaller text on the table. If there was either a way to set the size that cards should appear when played to the table or to click them to get the image view option, that'd make reading cards to the table much easier.
The second thing we noticed was that players cannot take cards from the table that they didn't play (except for the GM), even if the deck is set to let all players draw cards. This led to some difficulty involving a card that allowed a player to shuffle the discards and draw 4 randomly. As GM, I flipped the cards and shuffled the cards manually on the table under the Fog of War and then revealed them to him for him to ping the 4 cards he wanted, but I couldn't figure out a way to give them to him without revealing the cards to myself as he could only directly take the ones he himself had played, not the ones I had. It seems giving control of cards to all players when players can draw their own cards (or an additional option for the deck to explicitly allow it) would fix this and it would even work as an alternative to the first suggestion as people could pick up others' cards to view them and then place them back.
The final suggestion regards one of the mechanics of the game. It has one deck formed of two different coloured cards. When shuffling, you shuffle the green-bordered cards and brown-bordered cards separately and then stack them on top of each other. I implemented this via having two decks, introducing the brown one after the green one ran out, but it leads to every player having two different hands and players could tell how many green and brown cards each player had, which they are not meant to know.
This could be easily solved by giving each card a numeric sort value. Shuffling cards of the same value would work like it does now, but all cards of different values would be shuffled separately and stacked in ascending order. I could then combine the decks, give all the green cards the value '0' and the brown cards the value '1' and could then shuffle the deck to get the right order. This would also allow decks that fully sort themselves into a pre-defined order when shuffling them, allowing you to set up a nice looking round counter and various other things.
I'm sorry if these have been suggested before or the explanation is a little long-winded, but they would remove the few minor problems we have with the current implementation.
