The Game Mechanics: Hand Management

Hand management is a mechanic that rewards players for playing sequences or sets of cards. This mechanic is frequently paired with card drafting or set collection to create a card games like Star Realms and Magic the Gathering. Hand Management is also in a lot of board games like Fire Tower or Pandemic.

We are going to use Star Realms as an example of hand management. Hand management forces a player of the game to make the choice of including or not cards into their deck or hand. This is most often implemented by building your hand from scratch as in Star Realms where players start with the same basic deck of 10 cards. Then players are tasked with buying the cards they want to add to their deck. In these cases players are manipulating the probabilities of what they draw into their hand each turn.

Much like in Star Realms players of Magic build their decks to increase the odds of powerful combinations. The difference there is that Magic players come to the table knowing exactly what they have and how to the play the deck. Star Realms players must be more agile as they are building the deck as they go and reacting to what the other player is doing. Star Realms player however get to see every card that their opponent has in their deck and can build their decks accordingly.

The players will try and make a mental plan on what to draft on their turn but the other players will be drafting what they want potentially

Some games including Star Realms force the players into hard (but fun) choices. When drafting in Star Realms players will only have 5 cards to choose from (6 if you include the explorer) to add to their decks and those cards might not always fit into their plans.

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The most interesting part of Point Salad's Set collection is the ability for players to adjust and change the point values throughout the game. The point cards are really just the back of the ingredient cards. On a players turn if things are not going the way they thought or if its more advantageous to change players may flip over one point card. This will turn the point card into and ingredient card. This has two potential effects, players might complete other sets or gain further points in an existing set. Or players may avoid negative points. In Point Salad some of the point cards do have negative values along with the positive values.

Set collection has been around long before hobby gaming and is not going anywhere. Its ease to be understood is an great positive when designing games. Designers would love to be able to set a game down on a table and within minutes have the players moving on with their experience. Mechanism like set collection will be around as ling as people are playing games. Please join the email list and come back as we continue on with The Game Mechanics.