Wow, that’s a really good idea. I’d never thought about something like that before.
And now that it comes up, that’s exactly what would happen in a lot of cases with a new game; two people, a rulebook, and a game. No one teaching, no other resources. Can they work it out correctly?
I’m going to suggest that to my game designer friends. I think they’ll find it a fantastic idea! (Once they’ve written up rulebooks, anyway)
ARMed_PIrate although you mean well, a long lecture on what usability testing is not needed here. You sure assumed a lot of things about what we didn’t do, when actually there are years of giving the game + rules to people with nothing else, and years of refining that. Patreon alone had over a hundred such people.
I already explained the tradeoffs and testing with the deck / discard pile too.
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I played today with putting my tech cards on top of my discard sideways. This both made it clear that I’d teched, and prevented me from confusing my piles. A+ suggestion, Fry.
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I discovered the game by watching two players playing PbP codex before reading the rulebook by myself.
The mechanic I had problem with was flying.
I went to far on the Starcraft analogy and I didn’t understand that anti-air units could also attack ground units.
I mean, they weren’t strictly anti-air. But I asked the players and they quickly explained me so that was ok 
Something I love with Codex is that there is a specific tutorial matchup (Bashing vs Finesse) where almost all infos are written on the cards. That makes the game very casual-friendly, and Bashing vs Finesse is a great experience in itself.
Something I think weird is that there are some crazily good cards (Pirate Gunship, Bone Collector, Flagstone Garrison) and some absolutely meh cards (Guardian of the Gates, General’s Hammer, Rickety Mine…). But maybe they have deep strategical intrications and no one has discovered their weaknesses / strengths at the moment
I have not ever confused my draw/discard piles that I remember. The playmat makes it even easier imo. Just my 2c
Sideways tech cards is a great idea.
Because it’s a card game, and not a video game, all gold costs, attack values, and hp values have to be integers, and generally less than 10, for easy human comprehension.
This unavoidably means that some cards get “rounded up” in power level and other cards get “rounded down,” which leads to visible power level gaps between the best and worst option at a given Tech level.
Also, Pirate Gunship is balanced by how bad the Anarchy is at Tech II, just as Octavian is a balancing force for the high quality of Present Tech II.
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[quote=“EricF, post:27, topic:716”]
how bad the Anarchy is at Tech II
[/quote]This is a weird claim to make. I think Anarchy T2 is pretty strong. The amount of hasty, stealthy damage it can field at reasonable prices is pretty darn good.
I’d almost reverse those two: keep the discard landscape, put teched cards on top portrait
Anarchy tech 2 is fine but not all that great by tech 2 standards. It’s bad at blocking generally which makes getting to gunships hard, but you can absolutely win by just staying at anarchy tech 2. You’ll just do it faster by going to tech 3 
Right but if you’re going Anarchy tech 2 it’s because you’re the beatdown in the matchup when you decide to do that.You don’t go Anarchy when you need to defend… although if you need to defend as red you’re often in bad shape anyway. I think in that case you want to just attack harder 
I’m with ARMed Pirate. While I don’t have any issues at all with the draw and discard pile, I feel that the rulebook is severely lacking. Many rules explanations are simply not possible to derive directly from the rulebook. While I certainly appreciate the challenge of having a game be easy to explain versus having a rigorous framework for resolving game events, this is in no way a new problem. FFG has been solving this by issuing two separate documents with their LCGs. One “Learn to Play” guide which is much like Codex’s rulebook, and one “Rules Reference Guide” which is everything I wish Codex had. This allows rules questions to be resolved entirely by reference to direct sections in the “Rules Reference Guide” and when that is the case, players actually have a chance at figuring out the correct behavior by themselves without guessing or having to look for rulings online.
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It’s intentional that the rulebook maximizes understanding how the game works at all, and that anything involving advanced interactions is in a living document (not a printed one) that is linked here: Rulebooks — Sirlin Games
Sorry if that doesn’t work for you, but that has been the plan all along. And of course the game has already shipped, so it is how it is. If you ever have more rulings you’d like in that living document, you can tell @sharpobject in the rulings thread.
I’m actually quite a fan of the “living document” approach but I didn’t fully realize the scope of the mandate for the linked Google Sheet. It’s good to know that the intention is for that document to become an official and comprehensive set of more formal rules and that the printed rulebook was never indended to contain a complete and unambiguous framework.
P.S. Thanks for the game. I’m a really big fan, just frustrated.
Yes it’s meant to house basically everything not in the rulebook. Also, there is a web interface to the spreadsheet in the works too. I think it’s not actually finished, but pretty close and can be found here for now: http://codexcards.surge.sh/
Separate from all that @sharpobject might write a comprehensive rules document if he ever gets around to it. (Though that’s kind of academic, any question someone would want to know should be in the rulings anyway.)
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I already had a look at that in the past weeks and I have to say that this is amazing.
I believe that this will be VERY helpful in answering questions that arise while playing once the sets of me and my friends are in our hands.
A system like this is pretty clever in my opinion and I have not seen something like it for any other game.
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When I have played the game locally without mats, I always have draw pile on my left hand side, and the discard on my right hand side, to thoroughly separate them. But the mats will be good enough for me.
But it is a recurring issue in many games: How do people not think about what they are doing when they are doing it?! When you discard cards, make a mental note “the discard pile is here” and when you draw, make a mental note “the draw pile is here”.
You don’t even have to make a mental note in Codex, the boxes clearly say what they are, so you can just check before you do anything
My gaming friend is notorious for doing this in many different games, so I am personally just a little tired of it
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I mostly play games with face-up discard piles so it’s harder to mess up D:
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I briefly misinterpreted this as being some bold new Codex variant
I played last night with my discard pile turned sideways and it worked great! No issues, not even once. Thanks for the suggestion whoever suggested that!
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Hello there!
I’m the person actively working on http://codexcards.surge.sh/ (also hosted at http://codexcarddb.com/ ), so if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for features that you’d like to see, let me know!
I don’t have a designer (which is why the site looks so plain), but the hope is that it should work decently well on your phone so you can look things up in the middle of a game.
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