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.

  • Balanced if it is not strongly left or right.

That Balanced bucket is broad on purpose. It includes:

  • Cards that lean forward.

  • Cards that lean backward.

  • Cards that are genuinely symmetric.

In other words, “Balanced” here really means “not clearly left or right”. It does not mean “neutral in every possible sense”.

What “card balance” means in practice

When the game builds the five card layout, it aims for a simple pattern:

  • 2 Left

  • 2 Right

  • 1 Balanced

That one rule gives several guarantees at once:

  • There will always be movement available toward either side of the board.

  • There will always be exactly one card that is not side biased. That card might be forward leaning, backward leaning, or truly centered.

  • You will never see a five card layout where everything is pulling in the same lateral direction.

The original “too many backward cards” problem gets solved automatically. All of the backward leaning cards live inside the Balanced bucket, and there is exactly one Balanced card in each five card layout. So yes, it is still possible for that one Balanced card to be a backward only card, but it cannot show up three or four times in the same deal.

Even in that worst case, the other four cards will still provide left, right, and usually forward progress. The game can move.

How the balancing pass works

The actual code has a few moving parts, but the idea is simple.

  1. The game starts by dealing five cards at random from the selected sets and expansions.

  2. It counts how many of those cards are Left, how many are Right, and how many are Balanced.

  3. If the counts are already 2 / 2 / 1, the job is done.

  4. If not, the game starts shuffling inside the constraints:

    • It removes a card from whichever direction is over-represented.

    • It looks in the remaining deck for a card from the direction that is under-represented.

    • It drops that replacement into the five and checks the counts again.

  5. The process repeats until either the five cards match the target pattern or the deck runs out of usable replacements.

There is some extra bookkeeping in the background:

  • Wind cards and non Wind cards are kept in the correct pools, so rebalancing never pulls in a card that does not belong to the selected card sets.

  • The Balanced bucket is checked using that simple direction tag, not by reading every square on the card.

From the player’s point of view, this all collapses into a single effect: the five cards always contain a healthy mix of left, right, and “other”, instead of clustering into something that only wants to drag the game backward.

Why Quick Play always uses card balance

Quick Play is meant to be the default “sit down and get a real game” mode.

For that, the direction mix matters a lot. The goal is:

  • Fewer stalled openings where both players feel like all the cards are fighting them.

  • More turns where at least one proactive idea exists for each side.

  • A consistent environment that feels fair enough to support ratings, experience gain, and events.

So in Quick Play:

  • Card balance is always on.

  • Every five card layout goes through the balancing pass.

  • The randomness lives inside the constraint “2 Left, 2 Right, 1 Balanced”.

The result is not a perfectly smooth experience, but the worst deals are filtered out. Games start moving instead of immediately backing away from the center.

Why you can turn it off for friend challenge games

Some people like the rough edges. Some want to see what happens when the system is allowed to deal completely wild sequences. Others want to recreate something closer to a physical deck where every arrangement, including the miserable ones, is possible.

That is why card balance is exposed as a setting for friend games:

  • In friend challenge settings, you can disable “enforce card balance”.

  • When it is off, the server simply shuffles the allowed cards, grabs five, and uses them as is.

  • You can still keep balance on for Quick Play and other structured modes, while using pure randomness when both players agree.

Quick Play stays balanced. Friend games are where experimentation lives.

Why digital makes this practical

Doing this by hand with physical cards would be technically possible and practically annoying.

A physical setup that imitates this system would require:

  • Separating the deck into three piles: left, right, and “not left or right”.

  • Shuffling each pile separately.

  • Drawing exactly two from the left pile, two from the right pile, and one from the center pile.

  • Repeating that process whenever a fresh layout is needed.

It is the kind of routine that is fine for a controlled test, but too fiddly for casual play.

The digital dojo can do all of that work invisibly. The server knows the direction tag for every card, can count and swap in milliseconds, and can make card balance something you toggle with a single setting instead of a physical sorting job.

What this changes for actual games

Enforcing card balance by default does not change the rules on the card faces. It changes the shape of the deals:

  • You still get sharp, strange, and sometimes awkward card mixes.

  • You are much less likely to see hands that are dominated by backward movement.

  • The first few turns almost always include at least one way to push the position forward or sideways into a real fight.

Games feel more about reading the rotation, planning around direction bias, and less about being stuck with a hand that simply does not want to participate.

That is why card balance is on by default for Quick Play, and why it is still offered as a switch for people who want to see what happens when that safety net is removed.

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