Leaning Left and Right: Why We Enforce Card Balance
Every Hidden Path game starts with the same structure: five movement cards are selected, two go to each player, and one becomes the spare that will rotate into play. As the card pool grew, a problem emerged. There are cards that mostly move pieces backward. With only a few of these in the system, this was fine. Once there were enough of them, a bad random deal could look like this: Most of the useful moves pointed backward. Neither player had a good way to advance. The “correct” play was often to retreat, pass, or stall for several turns. Technically the game still worked. Practically, it felt like the system had slipped out of gear. The fix was to stop thinking only about what each card does individually, and start caring about the direction mix of the five cards as a group. How cards are classified For card balancing, each movement card is tagged with a simple direction : Left if its main impact pulls pieces to the left. Right if it pulls to the right. ...