Week 9

This week in class we studied and played card games, my group was assigned to play Burger Truck Battle. The set up itself was in a standard ordinal fashion “Since cards are planar and uniform, they can be grouped into sets, counted, sorted, ranked, indexed, and ordered.”- The Playing Card Platform With each player being given a truck shaped card and the two different card sets being the ingredients deck and the customer deck. Basically you would pick up six ingredient cards and try to get a patty, lettuce, bun, and tomato card to play and receive a customer. This caused the game to be very spatial as “Cards occupy space…cards require a flat surface for arrangement and display, setting an upper bound for a game’s spatial density and distribution.”The Playing Card Platform. Luckily our desks had plenty of room since we kept hold of our ingredient cards as “a hand designates the cards currently in a player’s possession”The Playing Card Platform. Although we weren’t just trying to obtain four regular ingredient cards as we also had specialty cards, such as a diet card or french fries. The diet card cancels out an opponent's customer forcing them to go on a diet and no longer eat burgers. The french fry card allows a player to steal a customer from someone else, gaining them more points in the end. Of course games are all about balance so there are counter cards such as the cheat day card and ketchup card, allowing the customers to stay with their previously set burger trucks. Overall this game taught me to think on the balance required to make a game fair while also adding challenges to force the players to strategize. For example if I don't have all four ingredients to gain a customer I may want to steal from someone else, however I may be countered if they have a counter card to block my advances and make me a target for when they have a specialty card. I could instead use my turn to trade out some of my useless cards but that would be another turn without any real gain. In the end I have to make a decision and hope it turns out in my favor.