Card Design Guidelines

From RabbitWiki

• Buddha Buck's Fluxx card design guidelines: (not everybody agrees with these entirely, but they are a good place to begin)

1. "Draw one, Play one" are inviolate. No player should be able to be in a situation where they cannot draw at least one card during their turn, or play at least one card during their turn.
   • No "play zero" is a hard-absolute for me.
   • No "draw zero" isn't as hard an absolute, but it must be limited.
   • Every card must be legal to be played at an arbitrary time during a players turn; no card's legality can be dependent on anything.
   • I'm leery about cards which even -allow- players to avoid drawing or playing during their turn.
     
2. The game should have no hidden state between turns. When it gets to their turn, a player should be able to look at the rules in play, the keepers visible, etc, and know exactly what he or she needs to do. As such, no rule can have an expiration date.
   
3. I don't like "Instants". To me, they violate the flavor of the game; change it into something else.
   
4. No tokens:
   • The use of tokens would violate the idea of the game being complete in just the deck of cards.
   • Once the first card that needs tokens is allowed, this would encourage more betokened cards.
   • Tokens would expand to many token types out there, which the players would have to keep in mind -- that's a backup token, those are expiry tokens, that's some sort of power token, etc. This would cause unnecessary confusion. As such, I'd prefer the card to be able to act as the marker or token itself. In that case, it wouldn't be available for pilfering or to be shuffled into the deck until after the backup copy was discarded.