Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Palegreen/Crimson hand control is gaining some strength.  Serpent's Curse + Death + Distressing People = 5 card max hand for your opponent.

For hired sword, is the instead for the negate and draw or just the draw?  Im guess just the draw but not 100% sure based on wording

For Hired Sword we feel like it might be more clearly worded as - "Negate an opponent’s card. Opponent may discard the negated card. If they do, discard this card after battle. If they do not, you may draw 1."

How do the Aliens SA work with it saying 'player' ?

My  is that it can be confusing but so is wording on Claudius Lysias regarding “transfer to an opponent.”  There’s no consistent wording with these capture abilities:  Capture this character to opponent’s LoB, Capture this character, Transfer a character to an opponent. I feel that one term should be chosen, and that to be the simplest wording for newer players to easily understand, regarding this ability going forward.

Quote from: Sean on December 02, 2019, 01:28:34 PM

How do the Aliens SA work with it saying 'player' ?

The card becomes a captured character under the control of the chosen player. We used to write out "capture to a land of bondage" but the LoB is the default location for captured characters so spelling that out feels unnecessary.

Do you think that's something people will find confusing?

For the most part Redemption doesn't eliminate old keywords through rotation or by no longer using them. In recent years we've tried to be very careful about adding new keywords so that we don't end up with too many. We've also tried to eliminate some redundancy (EX: ignore and repel or immune and protect). Adding another keyword that is a subset of capture feels like it might be a step in the opposite direction.

We also want to be very thoughtful about how clearly new keywords represent what they do. "Exile" is a term in MTG synonymous with our term "banish". I'm afraid if we used "exile" in Redemption for anything other than "remove from the game" it would be confusing for the many players that play both CCGs. "Bounce" and "reserve" are examples of recent keywords that most people find intuitive.

The capture portion of Aliens says "You may capture this card to a player." We have other cards in LoC and currently plan to use that same language anytime we want a captured card to be able to go to a Land of Bondage other than the player who is using the capture ability.

We expect to have to teach players that "capture" means - "This card becomes a captured character. Captured humans are treated as a Lost Soul. The default location for captured characters is the Land of Bondage."

Once you understand "capture" it's probably pretty clear what "You may capture this card" means on Aliens. That leave us with "to a player" potentially leaving confusion? We used similar language on Eternal Judgment last year ("give this card to a player" instead of "capture this card to a player") and I don't recall anybody asking what that means. Maybe it's our past inconsistency as the old language for "captured this card and place it in opponent's land of bondage" has become more refined?