gemini://thrig.me/blog/2024/01/28/the-cards-my-destination.gmi

Games such as RoboRally use random movement cards to program the motion of an object through a hazardous environment. There are non-zero odds that a bad hand will be dealt, but what are those odds, and how bad could a bad hand be? The problem here is that a bad hand will depend on the context. A typical bad hand might be when, say, your robot is facing a cell of sudden doom (cliff, crusher, etc), and you are only dealt move forward cards. With arbitrarily nine move forward cards in a deck of 27, and dealing five cards to a hand that's (if my math is right) 9/27 * 8/26 * 7/25 * 6/24 * 5/23 or pretty low odds of only move forwards.

The odds are actually higher than this. Say you need to play three of those five cards, and there are two "do nothing" cards in the deck. Another bad hand is "nothing, nothing, forward, forward, forward" assuming any move forward spells doom. A single "nothing" card and the rest forward is also bad. A single move backwards card and four move forwards is also bad: move back, forward, forward and dead. Turn left, turn right, and a bunch of forwards is also bad. At some point the odds calculation may become too complicated, and there are many other bad situations: maybe you are on a conveyor belt (to doom) and only get turn cards. Playtesting can help. Ideally one would have had a "this is a bad hand" button and then to tally that count against the total number of hands played.

This is sort of the hardcore roguelike approach. Bad hand? Too bad! Players will need to be (or will become) aware that really bad hands can be dealt, so maybe they shouldn't risk moves that assume the next hand will have what they need, especially when they are in a tricky situation with high potential for doom.

Informally in golf one might get a "do over" if the previous shot went off into the woods. In a computer game one might have a limited stock of mulligan buttons so when a bad hand shows up your current hand is discarded, the free cards reshuffled, and a new hand is dealt. When to use mulligans and possible negative effects on the player's score may provide for interesting tradeoffs.

A free version of the game could be hardcore, and a paid version might offer mulligans. Competitive play may need some form of mulligan so that skill is more favored than luck.

The player might be given a larger hand so that the odds of getting a terrible hand go down. Other game systems might be devised where a player can stash cards for future use (a "rainy day fund") and dip into those savings when a bad hand turns up. Or there might be special abilities to pull (probably known) cards from the discard deck, or to pick a card from the opponent's hand to exchange with one of yours, etc. All sorts of things could be devised to smooth over the cold hard statistics.

The Cards, My Destination

Nothing

Mulligan

Card Buffers

The Prototype That Instigated The Above Ruminations