OK, so starting with the premise that Vassal stacking/unstacking behaviour is not intuitive (you can disagree with this, but please take it as given for this thread) and I generally won’t use it:
You have 10 piles of resources, in the form of decks, with the number of pieces in each deck displayed by text labels.
Which is a better way of allowing players to discard single pieces from each deck:
Have 10 action buttons, one next to each deck, that each discard one of the corresponding resource
Have a trash/rubbish icon nearby, so that dragging a piece onto it triggers discarding of the piece
The “trash bin” method, whether it’s a deck or an icon or just a location, might make for a cleaner UI than having TEN action buttons. You could also allow right-clicking on each deck to activate a command that discards one of that resource (you’d add a Deck Global Key Command to the deck).
Are the resources themselves counters/cards because you also drag them to other places during the game? Or receive them in the form of cards e.g. like in Catan? Because if the amount of resources is just a number then you might be better off with just a Global Property for the count of each resource, and then you could have a + and - button next to each resource to tick it up and down. I guess you could have + and - buttons even if you stayed with deck implementation.
I usually try, where possible, to make it so that there are several ways for a player to accomplish a goal – because some players will try to drag, some will try to right click, some will look for a button, etc. But obviously that’s more work.
Currently the decks have a right-click “discard all” command that sends the deck to another deck, effectively emptying the deck for when that is appropriate. I was not aware that a deck could feature a deck GCK activated by clicking on the deck for other results - how do you do this?
The resources could technically be just a number once taken from the main map by a player command, so they don’t have to exist in the resource piles, but the rules also explicitly state that players can place the resources in positions to indicate how they are being used, so I do want to leave players that option.
Interesting that you think 10 buttons is too many, but 20 +/- buttons would be OK.
I’ve become a big fan of Game Piece Inventory Windows for manipulating large decks or stacks of units. It places a button on the main toolbar with a global hotkey. You can show thumbnail icons of pieces by matching properties, and they are sorted automatically and unlike most buttons, can be hidden to some sides. In this case, I’d create a window for each deck, showing only the pieces in that deck. If a player clicks on the button (or it is triggered), a window pops-up and he can view all the cards at a glance and discard each with a simple right-click action.
Thanks for input. Seems like overkill for this though - for each resource pile the only relevant values are type and amount, and optionally, for some players, locations of single resources when used. I also prefer less windows wherever possible.
I do often use game piece inventory windows for lists of cards and card statuses in CDGs and the like - cards not yet seen, cards in discard, that sort of thing. Not for this module though.
If there isn’t really anything meaningful to inspect on each card, other than a type and number, I’d just eliminate the piece entirely and go all digital…
As I said, not quite that simple. Almost that simple, but location before they belong to a player is essential, and location when used is something a player must have the option to indicate.
For the Deck GCK, you go to the entry for your deck, and instead of double-clicking to open properties, instead right click on it, and select “Add Deck Global Key Command”. And then treat it as a command about to be issued to the current members of the deck – so you can put a “matching properties” expression filter, you can tell it to apply to a fixed number of pieces (e.g. 1, if you want it to only throw away one resource). And whatever you put in the “Name” field will be what appears on the right-click menu of the deck. You can fill out the Report field if you want (e.g. “$PlayerName$ spends one Wood”) or leave that to the piece itself when it receives the DGCK. I use them for things like “Draw 8 Cards”.