Hi all,
Today I’ve been really getting into the details of what the action cards are about and what would make the perfect action deck for the game. My data set is a de-duplicated list of the version 3 Action Cards. My intent is to ensure that all Action Cards (apart from the Nope equivalent) should be unique in the deck.
If you want to see the current Action Card deck, you can download it here.
I first took a look at the target of the card, whether the card is played on the player themselves, on another player, or on visitors on the board.

While I think this makes a nice graph, the split between yourself and other players I don’t think gives the game enough interaction, so I think I’ll work to tilt it more towards using cards on other players. Maybe to around 60-70%.
I’ve also taken a look at the part of the game the card affects. This is similar to the target, but here I looked at does the card affect the matching process, player attributes or rooms for example.

It’s pretty clear at the moment there’s a strong trend towards card that impact the matching process, whether that’s improving your own chances or reducing another player’s. This is the core of the game, and so I think this will always be the more dominant part here, it does make me think that some other areas could benefit from some action card attention.
Finally for today, I looked at frequency of use. Primarily, how often would players have the chance to play the card. This is kind of difficult, as many cards are dependent on factors within the game that could or could not arise; however I’ve taken a shot at categorising them into the following:
1 – Anytime: Can be used pretty much any time (e.g. stealing a visitor card from another player)
2 – Frequent: Can expect to be used at least once in a round or on your own turn most of the time (e.g. force another player to re-roll a successful match roll)
3 – Sometimes: Should be possible to use in one or two rounds (e.g. add a kink for a single roll)
4 – Rare: Could be once per game (e.g. if you reach 0 horniness, gain 1 horniness now)

Here I think is where a lot of attention should be focused. I believe the Rare and Sometimes should make up a total of around 25-40% of the deck, ensuring that players with a couple of cards in their hand should be able to use at least one of them during a round. With a little work, it should be possible to improve the usability of many of the existing cards and ensure that’s a focus for the new ones that will be added.
So what do you think about the Action Card deck? What kind of percentages do you think should be for the split for target, affect and frequency? Or is there another trait you think I should be looking at or would like to see the data on? Let me know in the comments below!