Simplify return to supply, or discard, or spend#756
You have to drag lots of things between locations, often panning around, when not everything fits visibly onto a single screen. One of the most common manipulations is to spend something (e.g. money, a resource, a card) and thus returning it to the supply could be simplified. What if a keypress or menu option allowed for it? This would reduce navigation and manipulation fatigue in an environment which already has a lot of it.
If an object is assigned a home (e.g. a bag or a zone) this new option will activate. When this option is selected, the resource will be dropped onto its home and as the physics are applied, the object will land wherever it may. Optionally, a more sophisticated zone could trigger certain behaviors (e.g. a layout zone or a scripting zone).
Decks are different. While a draw pile is the origin of a card, you would not necessarily want a spent/discarded card to be returned to its draw pile. Rather, you’d designate a zone as the home for the discards of a particular pile. The players can still manually shuffle and replace the draw pile as needed.
In either case, the mechanism is simple. Press a key and the select object(s) return swiftly to wherever they belong.
Menu option with the described behavior can be easily done by a simple script.
While techinically possible with a script, I’m not aware that many games have it. So for all intents and purposes right now it’s not a feature. I’m suggesting trivializing the setup (e.g. by providing a home setting on objects) would make this ubiquitous.
I’ll go one level deeper. I kept it out of the initial idea to keep things simple.
Each item sitting in a zone/bag could be connected to a petri net of zones/bags existing along a path. Consider Terra Mystica’s 3 power trays a slightly more complex state machine. When you select a bunch of power you want to spend, you’d press a single key to automate its transport to the next tray. Such a setup would involve only wiring up a directed graph between zones/bags and no scripting. And each bit sitting in a zone/bag would understand the keypress which sends it along its way.
As already suggested, this can be scripted, but doing so presents a certain degree of friction which prevents ubiquity. But imagine the user experience that presents itself when networks are wired up and by virtue of a keypress bits can be visually pushed along the state machine without the panning/dragging, and all without scripting. In situations where a bit has multiple potential next destinations specific keypresses would disambiguate.
The concept of home that I described is a single edge (state transition). It is less sophisticated than a full-fledged petri net. It was the most bang for the least cost I could come up with.
I have repeatedly noticed people say playing in digital reality takes longer than in the real world. I’m of the mind that good design can overcome this concern and that out-of-the-box features (e.g. no scripting whatsoever) should seek to lend, in as much as possible, to swifter play.
A “Discard” or “Return to Supply” function would be greatly appreciated.