Rules are meant to be broken
Rules are meant to be broken
Rules are meant to be broken
January 27, 2020
Summary
Early in the design of Cartographia, we had a problem about players hoarding cards: it's a bad strategy, but every now and then a player would try it and ruin the night for everyone else by limiting their access to specific cards, slowing the game economy, and opening their own options to such degree to cause monumental AP. All of that would turn a brisk 75 minute game into a 3 hours slog.
We tried pushing players to action, but sometimes, it was a first-time player who didn't want to commit early, and would just let others do stuff to then copy: we had hit the limit of soft limits.
We wanted to take the possibility of a player tanking the game for everyone else completely out of the equation, and so we added a hard Hand size limit: you could never have more than 15 cards in hand.
Of course, board games do not enforce the rules themselves, and so often, people would forget.
My co-designer wanted to dump the hand size limit, but I convinced him to try one last thing: an exception to the rule.
The game has a tech tree, and so we diminished the hand limit to 10, and added a power in there that boosted it to 15.
It added a reminder during the teach: When I was teaching the game, I'd explain the hand size limit while explaining the draw phase, and then again for the techs.
It adds an enforcer to the table: If I'm playing, it's easy for me to police what others are doing: I know the game inside out, I know how much hoarding hurts it, and I know what I'm doing enough to be able to pay attention to what others are doing.
It's not related to breaking the rules per se, but to the point of increasing retention: The rule came up often and early: When you are taught a game, you have a lot of information in your brain, but you haven't learned it yet: it's when you actually start playing and experiencing it that those rules start to merge together into a system.
With the lower hand size at the beginning of the game, someone hit that 10-card limit in the first three or four turns, while at 15, there were games where it never came up.
Reference
Rules are meant to be broken. (2020, January 27). Retrieved September 15, 2020, from https://subsurfacegames.ca/2020/01/27/rules-are-meant-to-be-broken/