A thousand pixels from your own cards

The board has two arrangements, worked out from how many people are sitting down. I wrote about that this morning.

On a phone you were getting neither.

The rules were all inside a desktop clause

Every rule that builds those boards lives beside the sizing it belongs with, and the sizing is genuinely a question about screen width, so the whole block sat inside a clause that only applies above a certain size. Which panels a board HAS went in with it.

So a player alone on a phone was shown the empty lane the solo board exists to remove, measured at 367 by 265, and the arithmetic that replaces it was in the document at nothing by nothing. The right class was on the board the entire time. That is why nothing caught it, and why the check that catches it now asks about the SHAPE of the board rather than what it is called.

The rule I have written down for myself: which panels exist is not a desktop question. How they are sized and placed is.

Then everything was too far down

Fixing that got you the right board and left a worse problem. Your hand began 1033 pixels down a 844 pixel screen. You scrolled a full screen of numbers to reach the cards you were about to play.

There were two ways to fix it and only one of them is any good.

The obvious one is to move the hand up, above the panel that carries the arithmetic. It works, and it costs you the thing that panel is for: the ways to pay a Manifestation live there, and settling one is half of what you do in a game. Moving the hand above it means moving the payment somewhere else, and now a phone has its controls in a different place from every other screen.

The other is to make everything above the hand smaller. Nothing moves, nothing changes meaning, and the payment stays exactly where it has always been.

The hand begins at 599 now.

What got smaller

The entity panel, 336 pixels down to 170. Its meters became single lines, label and bar and figures on one row, and then the whole set moved to sit BESIDE the card rather than under it. The card is about 108 pixels tall and the name beside it is about 50, so the space to the right of the card was simply empty and the meters were starting below all of it.

The Counter of Fates, 438 down to 144. It is a strip of three cells rather than three columns of prose. What went is the commentary, not the numbers: every value you do arithmetic against is still there, and the sentences explaining them are gone, because the cards they explain are in your hand a few hundred pixels below.

The twelve marks moved out of the Pantheon tile. They need the full width, and a tile cannot give it without spanning, which was pushing the Grave onto a row of its own. On a phone they now sit directly under the entity they are counting, which puts the lit one next to the thing it stands for. On a wide screen they are back under the Pantheon count, from the same piece of markup.

The seats and the arithmetic take turns

The seats had nowhere left to go, and the answer people usually reach for is a tab.

A tab is wrong here for a reason particular to this game. It is cooperative, so you spend most of your time not playing, and the moment you most need to know what everyone is holding is exactly when it is not your turn. A tab hides that during the window you are least engaged, and something you have to remember to open is something you forget to open.

Look at what the three cells say off your turn: Ruin nothing, Ability none, Toll nothing. They are about a move you are not making.

So they swap. Your turn, that space is the Counter of Fates. Anyone else’s, it is the seats. Derived from the position, never chosen, which is the rule both boards already run on.

What you hold, by Force

A row of small marks above the hand now, one per Force, with how many you hold and whether it is currently held. It came from a study that had them as effects, Heal and Draw and so on, and that was two different things in one row: the first two name an outcome and the third named a state.

It also meant the one that matters most was the one that did not say which suit it was. Three Void cards banking against an entity that denies the Void is the biggest swing available to you, and its mark read only as “incubating”. They are Forces now, which is the vocabulary the entity’s own badge is using one panel above.

And something that was never there

Settling a Manifestation offers you the cheapest ways to pay, and beside them a fourth option, Choose cards, for when none of the three is the one you want.

On a phone it was not there. A rule meant to drop the third and most expensive suggestion was counting buttons, and Choose cards is a button sitting beside them, so with two suggestions it was the third button and with three it was the fourth. Either way it went.

It had been missing since the day the phone rules were written. Nothing reports an option that is merely absent, and every player who wanted it was told, in effect, that their hand was one of three shapes.