Write Everyday Project #9, Dice vs Cards

Well, we missed the once a day deadline, since it's been 26 hours since my last post, but I'm willing to let technicalities swing the other way here too.  Since I haven't gone to bed yet, it's still "Saturday" regardless of what the clock says.  And hey, it still IS Saturday in Alaska and points west.

Besides, it's not as if there's money riding on this.

Today, I played Android, a board game about a sci-fi murder mystery, with my brother and a friend.  And I've come to the conclusion that if you want to reduce randomness in your game, moving away from dice to a card based system doesn't really do it.  That way increases randomness, not decreases it.

I suppose it doesn't have to, but the last two board games with card based resolution mechanics I've played, tonight's Android, and the new edition of Horus Heresy that I got last month, both have much wider event swings than their dice based counterparts like Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium.  In the card based games, inevitably some cards are better than others, and the appearance or lack there of of the best cards can swing the game in a way that one die roll rarely can in traditional games.  I've seen it happen, mind you, but it's a lot rarer to see a single die roll sway a game the way one card can, especially if it's one of the same few cards every time.

It comes downs to imbalance and variety of outcome.  In the case of the former, unless everyone has identical cards, things are going to be skewed one way or the other as one side will have greater utility of their cards than the other side  In the latter, dice have a limited range and you can predict the range of likely outcomes and use that to guess what might happen.  If nothing else you'll have an idea for what's possible.   When some cards are great and others so a lot more, you have a harder time defining how your games plays. When the outcome of any pull of a card gives you a one in fifty chance of happening, those are pretty good odds if you're going to draw half or more of the cards in any one game.