The hand is the one part of Xenocide you touch every turn. On a phone it kept falling off the bottom of the screen. Fixing that meant deciding what a hand of cards is actually for. Here is the argument, with the real hand in it.
Everything else on the board you read. The hand you use: you pick cards out of it, and often more than one, and the whole time you are doing arithmetic about what is left. So it has to be laid out in a way that keeps every card visible and reachable at once. Eight cards, on a phone, is where that gets hard.
The first version wrapped. Eight cards would not fit across a phone at a size you could read, so the row broke, and the second row slid under the action bar at the bottom, which is where the buttons you press to actually play live. You would scroll the hand up to read a card and back down to play it. A player called it, exactly, deeply annoying.
01 · Why not a carousel
The obvious fix is the one a hundred card games use: a carousel, one card centred and the rest swiped past. It does not survive contact with this game. A play here is frequently several cards at once (an Ace bound to one other card, or a Ritual of matching numbers), and paying a Toll is a second multi-select, cards committed against a running total. A carousel shows you one card at a time. You cannot build a set out of a thing that hides the rest of itself.
So the constraint was fixed early and never moved: every card stays on screen, and every card stays tappable. Whatever the hand became had to hold that.
02 · The fan
What it became is a fan. The cards lie in one overlapping row, each card covering the one before it so only its left strip shows, and the left strip is exactly the part you read to tell cards apart: the rank and the Force mark in the corner. The last card sits full. Choose a card and it rises out of the arc; the ones you have chosen stand up together like a skyline.
Here is that hand. Put it through the positions a real turn puts it through, and drag the width to feel where the fan tightens. On a mouse, hover a covered card to bring it forward; a tap always means choose.
the old hand · a wrap
the fan
chosen · value · against a Toll of 15
The number in each panel's corner is what settled it: how many rows, and how far down the hand starts.
03 · Every width
The fan has no phone version and no desktop version. It reads the width it
is given and the number of cards it holds, and opens as far as the room
allows: drag the slider up and it spreads to a full card and a gap between
each, which is the spread it always had on a wide screen; drag it down and it
tightens to a peek. That is one clamp()
doing the work, not a breakpoint. That matters, because a phone-only layout is
a code path only phones take, and only phones would catch breaking.
04 · What it costs
A fan covers the centre of each card, and the centre is where the marks for a bound or incubating Force live. Switch the positions above to bound and you can see them on the full cards. What survives on the exposed strip is the card's dimming and the colour of its power word, and whether that is enough to price a held-back Force is a real question. The answer is that the Counter of Fates, a panel away, states it in words for the cards you have picked up. The fan does not have to carry everything, because it is not the only thing on the board.
That is the whole trade, and it was made with the real hand under a cursor rather than in the abstract, which is the point of this essay having one in it.