” No more than one Wizard may have a given card in their hand at a time”. Why wouldn’t many wizards know the same basic spell/potion and try to execute it at the same time?

I was imagining everyone playing from a common deck, but that’s certainly something that can be changed by proposal later if we want to drift toward deckbuilding.

IMO, having publicly visible hands of cards kind of defeats the point of cards.

Sorry, that was too early to vote and lock possible changes.

this rule mentions nothing about “publicly visible”. It is entirely possible for everyone to draw from the same deck and hide what cards they obtained.

[9spaceking] They’re “tracked as a comma-delineated list in the field “Hand” in the GNDT”, which we can all see.

Would certainly be more interesting to have secret hands if we can think of a neat way to do that, but we can get there from here.

I foresee hiding cards to be difficult to implement, at least without coding. I primarily wanted to use cards as a way of rationing actions, and of randomizing possible actions.

Secret hands probably give better gameplay opportunities but how do we verify them?
This rule does give a good foundation that can be expanded on, however.

We could do something with md5 hashes, which would be easy enough if card draws were a free, non-random pick - whenever you draw a new card you write a sentence description of your new hand and post the md5 hash to the blog somewhere; and at the end of the game, the winner can provide the original messages for all their hashes to prove they weren’t lying about their hands.

If card draws were random it would need a more complex system, which could still be done, but would be a bit painful. We could have the Historian deal cards out over private message, if they wanted to do that.

The Historian was planning on having to act as the dealer in one way or another. I would hate to use private messages though.