Face Down and Highlighting

Hi all, I’m trying to create my own module and if anyone would be willing to assist me it would be greatly appreciated.

Can Vassal do this? I want Vassal to draw cards facedown but here’s the catch. It can only be the first 5 cards I draw, after that I want to be able to draw face up.

And is there a way I can disable a card from going over another card when clicking on it. For example if a card is under another card I want the card underneath to stay underneath when I click on it.

And finally (I know this last one has probably been asked before) but how do I use the multiple cards function to draw cards simultaneously but put them next to each other when laid on the board instead of on top of each other.

I’m still kind of new to Vassal. :neutral_face:

Vassal 3.2.16
Java version 8 Update 91
OS: Windows 10

  1. For facedown to all players, I’d have the deck draw faceup, then use a layer on top of the mask (below it in trait order)… the layer being the same image as the mask, triggered by it hitting the board after being drawn from that deck only. Have it stop triggering using a global (so once five cards are drawn, the global triggers, and the layer is no longer used for the rest of the draws). If the owning player sees the first five draws, and the others don’t, I’d try the deck still drawing faceup, but with a global for the first five that when they hit the board after first being drawn from that deck (and again only from there), they auto-mask for the player drawing. I can elaborate on either of these in detail.

  2. Do you mean after expanding a stack and clicking on say the middle card it momentarily highlights over the stack for easy use? I don’t know how to do anything about that, except maybe to offer its menu choices elsewhere and GKC them in (which would take some figuring).

  3. I think the Players Hands Maps do this automatically, but I haven’t used those - so maybe start there. For a regular map, I’d try a board trigger and GKCs first (so having the triggering card send the other cards remaining in the drawn stack to the right or left a bit - making sure to prohibit the triggering card from sending the command back to itself or you’ll get poorly placed cards at best and an infinite loop at worst). Again, I can detail this out for you.

Overly complex. Provide board space and use 2 decks besides each other, 1 being the “top 5 cards” that are drawn facedown and the other being the remainder drawn face up (set the decks accordingly). To give the appearance of 1 deck, the “bottom cards” can be stored off map in a hidden map in a deck that automatically populates to the map deck as soon as the last card is drawn from the face down deck via the “send hotkey when empty” to the hidden deck

In fact you dont even have to put the 2 decks side by side. You can have them on top of each other provided there is a miniscule offset so they aren’t lying directly on one another - vassal can distinguish between the two decksas long as their xy location coords are slightly different