I’ve got a module where each unit in the play area has a set of 7 action cards that are used by the players to program what it does. Mirror matches and duplicate units are both possibilities, so I’m using a game piece palette for both the units and all of their “cards”.
At the moment, setting up the game requires each player to drag each of their units and each of the 7 matching cards for those to the play area, which amounts to a lot of manual setup before they can play the first turn. Obviously doing this once and creating a saved game helps, but it’s not versatile enough for all the various combinations of units players might field (there are no factions).
I’m wondering if there’s a way to automate this. Is there any way to have a piece “summon” all of the other pieces associated with it? Like I place a unit, and it produces all of the associated cards nearby? I looked at Place Marker, but without defining potentially hundreds of different cards as prototypes, it looks unworkable.
Yeah, I do this a lot. The trick is to have a hidden setup map on which all the pieces you need to call are kept, because you can’t send key commands to pieces in a game piece palette. It will be a lot of work regardless, and the place marker trick might even be the best way to do it, depending on your needs.
I would probably just go ahead and put the cards into prototypes. And then you can either do it the Benkyo way and keep all the cards on a secret map and Global-Key-Command them into play. Or you can do a Place Marker for each of a unit’s matching cards (and the apply-after-place keystroke can move them to where you want them)
Benkyo - using a hidden setup window is a technique I had not considered. In the context of this module, it’s probably more work here than it’s worth, but I can definitely see using that trick elsewhere.
Update: I did some experimentation with the Place Marker technique suggested by Cattlesquat and found it accomplished exactly what I want. It looks something like this:
Each unit has a statcard, and these are stored in a Game Piece Palette so that each player can field the same pieces, and potentially multiples of them. Each statcard has a trigger to “fetch pieces” that fires 7 Place Marker traits and a report:
6 actions, (which go into a player’s deck),
1 unit token, (which goes on a map),
They all show up in a stack, but I could just as easily send them to specific places.
All of the functionality for unit tokens, action cards, and the rest of what statcards do is stored in prototypes, so only the Basic Piece image and name need to be changed for those cards within each statcard’s definition.
I’m very happy with this solution overall. It’s quite maintainable as I add new units in the future.