Playing Cards: A Detailed Review

Have a new general feature to suggest, or think one should be tweaked? Share your ideas here.
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Cal
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2022 11:45 am

Playing Cards: A Detailed Review

Post by Cal »

I've gotten a good enough grasp of how to make money that I rewarded myself with the completely frivolous purchase of a deck of Moonlighter cards! I've been playing around with them a bit, getting a feel for what they can and can't do to figure out which games might actually be playable. They've got a good basic framework, minor bug aside, but to my chagrin, none of my favorite games are playable with their current functionality.

So! I've some suggestions which could really flesh them out as both a fun minigame and as a tool for RP.

Dealing the Cards
Starting off with the most complicated, but most significant, suggestion of the lot. xD

Card games almost always have one player designated as a dealer. It'd make sense if the person holding the deck could deal cards rather than just draw them - which would also allow them to "deal in" other players, linking them temporarily to the deck and game in play. Sort of like accepting being given an item or receiving medical treatment?

Play a card Face Down...
Right now, you can only play a card face up. A number of games involve playing cards face-down, especially single-player ones. It would also let you do fortune-telling with cards as well, as the typical method for card reading is "lay out several cards, then flip them over one at a time" - which brings up the second half of this suggestion! The dealer should be able to "flip" a card back to face up. "flip 2" to flip the second card, etc. The syntax would be "play 5 of coins face down".

... On Another Card
A common thing in games is playing cards in one or more stacks, rather than in a row. Something like "play 5 of coins on 4 of coins" - or, to combine this and the last one, "play 5 of coins on pile 2" to place it on a face-down stack. Stacking cards is mostly for single-player games, but there's probably a multiplayer card game or two out there with stacks.

Draw from the Discard
Last one, and also the simplest! The discard pile currently shows which card is on top - but you can't take that card. Being able to draw the top of the discard instead of from the deck is a crucial part of multiplayer games like gin rummy. I think you could implement it with an optional argument to "draw", "draw discard".

Some other minor suggestions
As a follow-up, and disregarding the bugs I filed earlier, I have some smaller suggestions for streamlining the play experience.

- Add "hand" as a subcommand to just see your hand
- Separate the "look" description of the cards from the in-play "cards" view, so that you can follow the game without having the whole descriptive paragraph there every time. Or at least trim the "cards" view to only have the short intro bit, i.e. "The image on the set of cards identifies it as a fairly standard Moonlighter deck of playing cards."
- "remove 5 of coins" syntax to move specific cards from the deck straight to the discard pile - this would allow for playing games that restrict the cards you can play with, along with making it easier to add future deck variants with additional wild cards (e.g. real-world jokers).
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