You Should Reward Topdecking

One common way to present cards to players is through a market. From a deck, a selection is placed face up, from which the player can draft the cards they want, then replace those cards from the deck. It is also common to allow players to blindly take the top card if they don't like what is available in the market. While top-decking works well enough as an afterthought, there are good reasons to provide additional incentives to players who choose to do so.

In Ticket to Ride, locomotive cards are powerful because they can be used as any car color, making it easier to complete routes. If you take a face-up locomotive from the market, you get only one card that turn instead of two. However, if you draw blindly from the deck and draw a locomotive, you still get to take a second card. This possibility encourages players to risk drawing blind from the deck, which may lead them to acquire car colors they weren't planning for, creating new goals. Every blind draw is an unsolicited resource, and unsolicited resources create goals.

In general, top-decking incentives either reduce the cost of acquiring a card or enhance its power. Ticket to Ride is an example of the former, and Silver is an example of the latter. In Silver, you try to minimize the value of the cards in front of you. Each turn, you can take either a face-down card from the deck or the face-up top card of the discard pile. Some cards have abilities that can only be used if taken blindly from the top of the deck and are then discarded after use. These abilities reward players for cycling through the deck and revealing more cards, preventing the discard pile from becoming clogged with undesirable high-value cards.

Players should be encouraged to take chances and embrace the unknown. Having a strategy is fine, but if nothing happens during play to change it, the game will get dull quickly. Adding incentives for players to top-deck creates pleasant surprises and opportunities to explore new strategies.