Foreshadowing Makes Event Cards Feel Fair

Event cards can cause frustration if they feel too unpredictable. To avoid players feeling arbitrarily rewarded or punished, an event needs enough foreshadowing to give them an idea of what to expect. There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. Show players the actual cards in advance
2. Create consistent, learnable rules for how events interact with the game state

The first approach tells players exactly what to expect but creates a memory burden, so it works best if your events are very simple. The second approach is less friendly to new players but allows more complex effects. The right choice depends on how much randomness you want and its complexity. You can also combine both approaches.

The easiest way to foreshadow an event is to show it directly. In Galaxy Trucker, you can view event cards for the upcoming trip during the shipbuilding phase to get an idea of what to expect and what your ship will need. Only two-thirds of the events are available to view, and players do not know their order, leaving some surprises.

Previewing cards works well for veteran players, but it is too much information for new players. Fortunately, because the build phase is real-time, new players can ignore the option to look at cards and have more time to work on their ships. Creating a tradeoff between previewing events and doing other things helps offset the advantage that experienced players have because there is an opportunity cost to exploiting their better understanding of the game.

Repeating the same events automatically provides foreshadowing. In Moon Colony Bloodbath, players cycle through the same deck repeatedly, adding a few new events each time. This method is powerful because players must resolve the effects, not just preview them. They quickly learn the deck and can plan accordingly.

The downside to showing players what will happen is that it requires them to remember that information. If events become too complicated, players stop keeping track. To solve this, give your events consistent rules for interacting with the game state that players can learn, so they can prepare without knowing exactly what an event will do.

If an event is sensitive to the current state of the game in a predictable way, players can prepare for it without knowing its exact outcome. In Spirit Island, there are patterns among the event cards that players learn through repetition. For example:

• Beasts hurt invaders in their lands.
• Disease hurts the Dahan in its land.
• The Dahan help spirits with their presence in the same land.

Even though players don't know what event comes next, they can still plan around the deck. They know to add beasts to lands with invaders, keep Dahan away from disease, and put presence markers with Dahan. Context-sensitive events teach players that there are ways to avoid disaster and court opportunities even if they don't know exactly what will happen.

The most important way to make events context-sensitive is to give players hints about where they will occur. Spirit Island events do this by localizing events to certain tokens on the board, such as beasts, Dahan, or disease. In Galaxy Trucker, many of the events ask the player to roll two dice to select a row or column, meaning that the center of the ship is more likely to be affected. "Where" is a lot easier for players to focus on than "what."

Event cards can shake up predictable gameplay, but they need proper foreshadowing to feel fair. Previewing and structuring events to be context-sensitive and localized gives players ways to prepare for random events. When designing your event system, ask yourself:

• How impactful are your events? The greater an impact they have on players, the more unfair they will feel if not properly foreshadowed.
• What implicit rules do your events follow that players can learn to expect? The more patterns players can find in their outcomes, the less arbitrary they feel.
• Are events spatially localized? Knowing that something bad is more likely to happen in a certain location lets players feel that they are opting in to risk.