How to prevent discard deck from being selected?

Module Design
1

Hi

I have a deck of cards defined and players take from the face down active deck and play a card on to a defined discard pile face up ( and stuff happens in the background with triggers and global commands depending on the card ). Everything works OK.

But I want to prevent players selecting and moving cards off the top of the discard deck and I can’t quite work out how to do it. Can the “does not stack” trait be set to not selectable/not movable when the card gets to the discard pile ?

Thanks for any help.

2

The Does Not Stack trait cannot be altered at run-time. Nothing easy comes to mind, but you could experiment with the “keystroke applies to all pieces/units ending movement on this map” map-level feature in combination with a Trigger and a Send to Location trait’s “send back” setting…I’d have to jog my memory, but I’m pretty sure I’ve used this to prevent a status marker from ever being moved off a track.

3

It’s possible that if you turned on does-not-stack to “not movable” that it would prevent the card from being moved off the discard pile (I’ve never tried that so not 100% sure, but it’s worth a try). Of course that would mean your cards were NEVER movable, since as Joel points out you can’t flip that property on and off at runtime – so then your cards would only move when players did right-click menu (and/or hotkey) things on them (e.g. right click on card and select “Play This Card” or something like that), and your triggers/traits on the card would deal with moving the card to the next spot.

4

@Cattlesquat - they have to be moveable unfortunately as there’s a scratch area they are dealt to and then a player arranges them into hands for the players which involves a lot of thinking and dragging them into various combos before a final decision.

But… Joel’s method is great - I’ve just coded it and it works.

I set an {$OldLocationName$==“Discard Pile Zone”} test on the trigger called by map movement and the trigger then calls a global key command calling a move back to the discard pile. Yippee!

Many many thanks. This forum is great.

5

As an aside for a future VASSAL version - perhaps a property of a deck could be that any card that joins the deck becomes unselectable and/or immobile

1 Like
6

Yes, please! I want to have a discard pile that cannot be selected (cards are stuck there … maybe until another card pile is empty and then they are all put in that empty deck). Seems like basic functionalities that would be supported.