Hello,

You know it, the duck's race (soon the duck racing) is a game entirely made by ourselves very specially for the playroom.
That's why, beside a few bugs that still stay, some of the game mechanic isn't well oiled and balanced.

IN order to make the game even more specific and more representative of the community, we would like to involve you in some conception details.
You will certainly be proud to have maybe brought a few stones to the cathedral!

Before submitting our first problem to you, here are a few rules to follow in this thread:

• Your messages will be carefully read, but don't expect that we approve or reject individually each proposition. Don't even expect any answer from us. That's often what happens in general, but it's going to be the case even more here.
• Make a proposition don't implie that it will be implemented, even though it seem particularely interesting. Administrators stay alone to decide what will or won't finally be implemented at the end.
• All useless messages like +1/-1 and all unclear propositions will be strictly moderated, so that discussions stay efficient and running in good conditions. Please sufficiently develop your ideas. It isn't necessary to enter into complicated formulas or technical stuff; what we ask is simply to well explain your proposition and what it could contribute to solving the problem in.

The frame being set, here's now the first question we would like to ask you:

We have been able to observe during this first month, that some players had the bad habit to make retention.
Otherwise said, they have many feathers, many cards in their hand, but they never play them.
IN extreme cases, it can really represent a kind of anti-game, for example when having 40 feathers and 10 cards.
This has been seen and notified by several people notably during the first tournament of the game (the tournament was in french).

Our question is thus the following: how to encourage them to play their cards?
Don't forget to take into account that one can have many cards but too few feathers, or the opposite, and that in such a case one shouldn't be too much penalised. Only the fact to ahve both many feathers and cards is really problematic.

Thank you very much for your participation!

Hello. Thanks for a great game, as well as asking for our input and creating the topic. In regards to the original problem proposed, I had a few ideas, but one seems the most interesting at the moment. We will have to think about specific numbers, so I will just give out examples for now. Let's say we are playing a game set to 5 laps, so you start out with 21 feathers. If a certain number of feathers is reached, perhaps 32, as well as a certain number of cards in the hand, maybe 7 which is more than double the amount you get at the start, your duck becomes heavy. In this state, you can play normally with one change. Your duck can't hold that much weight, so you become slower. Each roll of the die is subtracted by one. For example, if you roll a 5, instead of advancing 5 squares you would be advancing 4 squares. This in my opinion should not apply to a duel since you aren't walking anywhere. To get out of this state, you would of course need to fix one of the two problems, either reduce the amount of feathers to 31 in this case, or the number of cards in your hand to 6, or, of course, both. We would only have to think about the best numbers for this state to apply. Perhaps 32 isn't a good number, or 7 cards in the hand.
My second idea is to have certain squares on the board requiring you to play a card to proceed. Perhaps squares which give you feathers, like 28 since in this case you get both feathers and cards. One thing should be the case with this however, the effect of forced play should not activate unless you have more than 1 card. It certainly would only make the playing annoying if you were forced to play one card, and that was for example something like suicide. Perhaps it can be one of the effects of the sandbox, square 27 too. Pass your hand to your neighbor, play one card. In this case all players should play a card to proceed, except if someone has only one card or a small amount of feathers, maybe 5 or less.
I look forward to seeing what ideas other people come up with and future developments of the game.

I would keep it to just duck racing as you do with this topic and that would be excellent.
CARD ISSUES

with 1000 miles you have to junk a card if you are unable to use that card so if you have say 6 cards and you get 2 more you have to junk 2 that you don't want before you can continue.

TOO MANY FEATHERS

if you have 0 feathers you go to the back of the queue so you can do the same if you have too many feathers!

The only problem is if you answer a few high valued questions and are lucky to win all duels and get bad cards you may have a lot of feathers.

OK, I'll outline some of my views below. These aren't really opinions set in stone, I'm just providing them more as food for thought. This post is kind of long ish.

I'd actually like to know a bit more about why this is problematic. I have a couple of propositions which I'll outline below, but it might be worth outlining why this problem occurs in the first place. Is it just that we cosmetically don't want to see a bunch of people with a lot of feathers and a lot of cards? Or is it that people who almost never play any cards actually have a greater chance of winning. I currently don't believe the second reason is correct, because if you don't play cards at all, you're probably going to lose anyway.

Also, in what kinds of games do we most often see this problem? I would say one on one games, and I think this is because of droppable cards. Unless you have a bunch of cards that can move your opponent around, you're almost as likely to step on your own droppable cards as your opponent. And since most droppable cards have a negative effect, this makes people who play it safe very reluctant to drop those cards. Because lets face it. If I step on my own super glue, I'll not only have skipped 3 turns, but I'll also have wasted 5 feathers placing a card that I end up triggering myself. Mines are even more expensive. I'd much rather my opponent pays the feathers to drop the cards. This way, not only will he be the one who pays the feathers, but I'll have more feathers left over for the immediate effects like absence/soporithic pill cards, changing dice, guided missiles, and things like shortness of breath so I can push my opponent onto my droppable cards (or even better, his own cards). The more people in a game, the less this effect is noticeable, because it increases the chance that someone else will have landed on your card before you do it yourself.
On the other hand, there are also people who do use cards like taste for risk and homemade bomb. They will probably also be the ones who also just drop everything in the hope that their opponent will land on the negative effect cards. This is the high risk, high reward strategy. It sometimes works and sometimes it fails catastrophically. So there are actually two playing styles. Generally, a game with multiple playing styles is good, because it makes things more interesting. The same goes for most sports where you can either play conservatively or very aggressively.

Now, on to the propositions.

1. Have the future passive effect cards require you to pay a feather every turn, or every few turns. You can choose not to pay, but then the card is discarded.
2. A square on the board that requires players with more than 40 feathers to pay one feather for each card in their hand. This could either affect everyone when somebody lands on it, or only the player who lands on the square in question. 40 is a pretty random number, but since the number 40 was mentioned at the start, I'll just go with that as an example.
3. An ability that forces the playing of a random droppable card in the player's hand, except that the effects would be immediate and would affect the player who has the card. This could either be a square, or a card you can play on someone else. For example:
You play a card against your opponent that forces him to play a droppable card on himself. The game randomly selects one, and it happens to be counter current. Your opponent immediately discards counter current and goes back 3 squares. You could have them pay the feather cost as well, but that might be overkill, I'm not sure.
Or, like I said, this effect could be on a square, rather than a playable card.

This would encourage people to drop their cards, lest their own cards get used against them.

Hi,
the problem sometimes is that you'll have too many cards which you don't need, such as:
sandwich sandwich, 3 lunch, one rest..
having feathers i don't see as an issue since there are questions and duos for a reason.
and sometimes I noticed some new players they simply don't know what cards do, I don't think can be done much about that.
but even some of the ideas which are mentioned earlier in this topic are going to be implemented in that case we will need card junking system i think.
I rather get froze than playing the resting card for ten feathers :)
Myself I always play cards heavily but Lemonade explained where it can be someone might follow such holding cards strategy but he may lose those cards at any moment :D
I think board balancing is more important than holding cards issue.
good luck.

If you take 1000 miles as an example you don't want to play an out of gas card on yourself but you do on your oponent but you do want to play a 200
miles card but wouldn't be happy if your oponent gained a further 200 miles near the finnish line. I suggest that you can only gain the good things from cards you put down but only have bad things happen to you if you land on cards put down by other players.

1000 miles doesn't have any droppable cards, so that's an apple/orange comparison. I understand the sentiment, but I think not being affected by your own droppable cards at all would make this game a lot less interesting. Then it really is just a matter of who gets the best cards.

Perhaps a compromise might work. This could work either by:

1. Your own droppable cards don't trigger if you land on them by way of a dice throw. That way, they could only trigger if you get pushed by a card, whirlpool, etc. This might make the game more strategical, but it might also go too far. Not sure how I feel about this yet.
2. Some new cards that, when played, make you not trigger your own droppable cards for a few turns if you happen to land on them.

The point is the same concerning the effects of the action if it is good you want to benefit from it not the oponent and if it is bad you want the oponent to feel that and not you so 1000 miles is a good example.

Here's another proposition. Ejectable seat is another card that's almost never played, because the randomness factor is just too high. You never know if you will help or hinder your opponent with it. It would be very nice if you would always go forward with your own ejectable seat, but anyone else always goes backwards. I would be totally fine with greatly increasing the feather cost to compensate for this, since I realize 3 feathers really isn't that much for something that can give you a pretty big advantage. This card is one I almost always see just sitting in most players' hands, and increasing the feather cost would give people incentive to play this card while also preventing the hoarding of feathers.

in that case investment should work only for the player who dropped :) five squares+ is too much.

Yeah, investment and altruism I didn't mention, but they probably should at least not only be triggered by other people. Its still very possible to place them strategically as a kind of poisoned gift though, placing an investment on square 13 for example. But that's why I don't like the idea of only letting one side trigger cards. Double-etched swords can absolutely be a good thing, but they must be useful enough that players actually want to use them. In the case of investment, the reward is quite high even if your opponent does end up going forward by it. You can cause all kinds of mischief with 7 extra feathers.

If i'm repeating, sorry. I would like to give one proposition.
Playing in the teams will be good. Yes, i know, the game is partially random, but to play you can use your strategy because of using carts.
For example you can create teams in the 1000 miles game.

interesting idea, but how would we do it? I guess two players could control one duck but they have their own cards? That could work. But it would take a long time to code.

It would be also nice if there would be a shortcut like (shift v) in monopoli or (sift s) in yahtzee, to view information for you and other players.
It would be more useful than it is the shortcut ( s ), just because we could view information of player we want.
It would take shorter to do it than it is when we press s and have to listen untill the screen reader is finishing to read the information of all the players.

For now you can use page up/down, unlike other games here each one in separate line.

Yeah, checked and it works.
Thanks Fawaz, I newer knew this before.

I think that I came up with interesting options for solving problems with a large number of cards and pens.
option 1.
on the last and penultimate lap special rules will apply:
each participant, if he has more than three cards, must activate any of the cards before going down the block.
subject to sufficient feathers.
if there aren’t enough feathers, he discards any of the random cards.
and may continue to move.
option 2.
Realize cards with a reaction to cards.
for example, someone went with a card disaster card. and all participants at the table discard 1-2 cards randomly.
if there are no such cards, those who have a lot of feathers lose 1 feather at the beginning of the game, 3 feathers in the second and third circles, and 5 feathers in the last or c4 to 10 circles.
The name of the card is subtracting feathers or the card I came up with.
such a dangerous card should cost at least 5 feathers.
if not one of the participants has more than three cards, or the number of feathers does not exceed 5, then the card takes away only the feathers from the one who went with this card.
possible problems with the implementation.
if the game is actively running, and the cards are transferred, then one such person may be two such cards.
everyone needs to lose feathers or cards.
additional effects from the Card Disaster card.
cards are discarded onto random cells.
one player cannot discard all cards at once.
if there is a card on the cell where the player is already located, then the cards must be discarded to neighboring cells.
This is such an unusual idea for me to solve this problem.
difficult or not, you decide. but she has a right to exist!
And I noticed a nuance in my idea.
You need to clearly determine how many feathers are considered sufficient to fulfill the above scenario.
it is clear that there should be more than 10 feathers and more than 3 cards.
I apologize for my English.
I will be very happy if you answer me and develop my idea. or correct me and suggest your versions.