Add debuff UI to hands where "Hand will not score"

[drifting linden]

When playing a hand that won't score, it would be helpful to have some part of the UI show that your played hand is debuffed. Another option to consider would be adding a confirmation when taking an action where the hand will not score.

I've lost several runs to accidentally playing a 3-card or 4-card hand against The Psychic, which requires you to play 5 cards.

There is the warning shown at the top of the screen ("Hand will not score, Must play 5 cards"), but I typically ignore it. It first appears when you select one card to play, and it isn't relevant at that point (because you have more cards to play). By the time you finish selecting cards, you're looking at the Chips/Mult for the hand and the "Play Hand" button. I don't check the warning again because I've already "acknowledged" it in my mind, and it's no longer part of the UI I'm looking at.

This is not a problem for bosses that debuff cards instead of played hands, as the cards themselves are visually debuffed and it's clear that playing them won't score.

I would love to see a solution similar to how face-down cards are handled. The chips/mult are changed to ??? x ??? to signify that it's unknown what your hand will score.

In this case however, your hand would not score because of the boss ability. It would be helpful to see 0 x 0 in the UI, or perhaps just reusing the debuff ❌ on top of each box to signify that it's not being scored.

You could also consider putting a debuff ❌ on top of the "Play Hand" button when a hand would not score. This wouldn't disable the button, but merely show it as debuffed. There are still situations where you might want to play a not-scored hand, for example when you want to preserve your discards, and this would still allow for that.

For controller players (eg. Steam Deck), in this situation you could change the behavior of the X button to focus the "Play Hand" button instead of directly playing the hand to act as a kind of confirmation.

The list of bosses where this can be problematic are:

• The Psychic (Must play 5 cards)
• The Eye (No repeat hand types this round)
• The Mouth (Play only 1 hand type this round)
• The Ox (Playing a [most played hand] sets money to $0)
• The Arm (Decrease level of played poker hand)
• The Tooth (Lose $1 per card played)

[tall crypt]

i don’t see why the tooth and arm needs the proposed debuff ui

they are constant effects as opposed to psychic / eye / mouth yeeting the hand

[drifting linden]

They're less important for sure 🙂

[tall crypt]

personally i don’t have trouble with these things but i do understand how some people still misplay despite the warning being shown

[drifting linden]

It's just frustrating because when playing something like a three of a kind, I could have just thrown in two garbage cards and won.

[tall crypt]

that feels like more of a personal gameplay issue, but i do understand your frustration

an issue about this visual indication is that i can see some people being misled into thinking that they can’t press the button

[drifting linden]

I agree with the concern on the button. Perhaps the debuff UI on the chips/mult is sufficient? I would hope that the debuff design language would carry over though - you can play debuffed cards, so you should be able to press a debuffed button.

[pearl ingot]

i would appreciate the debuff ui for sure. ive lost a lot of runs this way

[tall crypt]

if im a new player and see a big red x over a button i would be scared to press it

[drifting linden]

And for sure it's something that can be played around - eventually I'll learn after losing enough runs - but it sucks to lose an entire run that could be fixed with a UI tweak.

I'm 50 hours in though and still making the same mistake over and over 😅

[tall crypt]

fun fact the “hand will not score” thing did not exist before in old demos

[drifting linden]

Brutal

[tall crypt]

at that time i facepalmed every time someone misplayed on a yt video and them reacting oops i forgot

the first iteration in attempt to prevent this from happening was that the boss outright “stops” you from playing your hand with an “Are you sure?” as text that popups. This wasn’t the best solution, as some people believed that they were softlocked (you have to press the play button twice without changing cards to “play” the invalid hand. people kept swapping cards which reset the condition causing them to believe they got softlocked) . Eventually, the warning text became this iteration, which is much better.

[drifting linden]

I can appreciate that, you don't want to feel softlocked.

[tall crypt]

take a look at this old bug report for instance

you can see the confusion the OP had

[drifting linden]

Ah yeah, I see the confusion. "Must play 5 cards" is actually "Only 5-card hands score"

[naive sentinel]

needed

[split granite]

this would be nice to have, I've lost a couple of really good runs to being in the zone and missing the message