Marking cards

This is a hard one - I'm not terribly happy with either of these suggested solutions, but they are the best I can come up with right now and hopefully they spark someone else who can refine them or come up with a better alternative. Good luck.

1) Draft from a neutral deck (like the random card selectors in Dominion) and have a copy of each card in a color coded deck for each player. From an ease of playing standpoint, this seems best because the players still have an easy color code method of distinguishing cards. The downside is more copies of cards. One way to cut that down would be to have drafting from one of the two colored decks instead of having a separate selector deck. If the person with the other color drafts a card they set it aside and actually use the copy from their own deck.

2) You could require or provide card sleeves and have them insert a thin colored token on neutral cards to show who owns them. Depending on what this is, it might be either too thick and interfere with shuffling or too thin and be too flimsy and fiddly.
2a) You could provide sleeves that have a symbol printed on them or a colored band that is visible only from the front. For example, a border that is black when the card is face down, but red or blue on the face up side.

I think it depends on how many cards are added to the draw deck.

If you're talking about a lot of cards its going to be either tricky or costly - repeating every card would mean doubling the number of cards in the game.

You could have a tally board. Each card would have a number or colour code. The tally board would have lines for each card to be drawn and spaces next to it - say 3 for the purpose of this explanation.

Card 1 = O O O
Card 2 = O O O
Card 3 = O O O

... and so on.

You would then have some counters - marked with numbers or colours, depending on which way you want to go. I'll use numbers to explain further, because I can't represent coloured dots here.

Player A adds their first card to the draw deck - which features the unique number 116. So on their tally board they would fill the spaces with counters featuring the numbers 1, 1, 6.

Card 1 = 1 1 6

The coloured variation would work exactly the same - but you would use something like coloured tiddlywink chips or small wooden cubes. In respect to the cards these would show pictures of the coloured cubes (Red Cube, Yellow Cube, Blue Cube) in unique patterns. Eg red, red, yellow / red, yellow, red / blue, yellow, red and so on.

How fiddly it gets depends on the number of cards you need to represent.

expanding on this idea; put a marker on your card with tile a number on each card played (face down) then put the same number in the bag and draw random tiles

I'd like to elaborate on the idea of "Redefine shuffle" by kos, as I like it a lot. One variant:

Let both players shuffle their own cards and keep them in front of them. Use a player-coded stack of cards containing as the same amount of cards as each player uses and shuffle them. I'm afraid I need an example:

• Black player uses 3 cards, let's call them 1, 2, and 3. She shuffles and places them in front of her.
• Let's assume her cards are shuffled like 231.
• While player uses 2 cards, let's call them 4 and 5. She does the same.
• Let's assume her cards are shuffled like 54.
• A stack of 3 cards denoting the black player ("B") and 2 cards denoting the white player ("W").
• Let's assume they get shuffled like BWWBB.

Now the first one and the last two cards get taken from the black's stack, i.e., the resulting order is 25431. This is not as simple as kos' idea, but still quite simple and it provides exactly the original shuffling (as I understand it).

(I've just read this thread quite quickly, so apologies if I'm repeating someone else, this is a bit like Shoe's response, only every action is randomly determined, not just the order of players)..

It seems that the original idea was to have people's actions happen in a random order but to enable actions from a commonly shared deck, so colour coding won't work.

Rather than code the cards why not have each player use a number of coloured tokens, which are placed in a bag, one token per action played. The players place the action cards face down in front of them. A nominated player then draws the tokens from the bag one at a time, and the corresponding player takes an action.

If you want the actions to occur randomly (as well as the player order) then get someone else to choose which face down action is played.

It would mean you wouldn't have to mark cards individually, or play about with sleeves.
HTH

I second Shoe's idea, then it's just 6 more cards in the game, numbered 1-6, to determine player order. Pretty cheap and fast.

I did also like Kos' idea, for different purposes. I would add that the final card drawn, after all of the players have drawn, would be the starting point (so it's not always starting at 1).