MArcomage

I suggest to disable "play" button if card has no effect.

There are people who remembers "no effect if *something*" only after they play card. Especially "prince of thieves"...

Happened to me once.

But here is the reason why your solution sucks:
If your oponent can precisely pay the card that will make him win, and you only have enough to pay The Prince, you can't even play it for the tokens. If you would trigger the effect in this situation, you still have a chance. This way it would be taken from you.

Happened to my opponent. We were both taken by surprise when it had no effect.

Just get used to it, I guess. If it happens to you once, you'll remember it in all your games afterward, guaranteed.

I screw up all the time, forget to look at opponents hand etc. It's just the way she goes...

There are other cards with worse effects if their condition isn't favorable. As examples, I'd give Greed is Good and Tidal Wave. Giving your opponent an extra 25% stock, or losing one Quarry and one Dungeon would be a bad thing. Even so, that's no reason to disable the play button. All it means is that you need to pay attention.

Not to mention that it would get pretty complicated to tell what is 'favorable' and what isn't without actually playing the card and comparing the game state. Especially with no prior design.

It's quite impossible for our game system to get information from card effect, that is needed to decide whether to block the "Play" button or not. Same goes with card modes.

With card modes it was less difficult and it was implemented with really unsystematic style. We had a list of all cards that must not be allowed to be played with mode that targets their own position.

This list was static, which is really a bad design choice, but there was little that could be done to improve this. The system really cannot extract such information from the card text.

Finally in https://netvor.sk/trac/arcomage/changeset/544 this hack was removed, because we allowed any card to target itself, because from system point of view, it is a legal action (even if it doesn't pay off in most cases). (See FAQ Q12).

Same goes for disabling play buttons. It is a legal action to play a card with no card effect and thus, we will allow it. Above posts decribe situations were it may be usefull to play it even without the card effect.

Perhaps the best solution is to, for cards that have "No effect if New," have that text precede the effect text. Prince of thieves has several lines of text and the final line is easily overlooked.

As I said before, you're likely to remember after the first time, but such a tweak could make it more apparent that first time.

I agree with DPsycho. If new effect should be the first effect listed

Definitely move "No effect if New" up first. I just played White lotus when New -.-

Yes, make it bold like keywords, or possible even a making a new keyword for it.

Definitely not a keyword, Rainbow Dragon etc... But text in Bold is not a bad idea.

Bold is reserved for keywords, so I don't want to use that. Besides, this is a turn base game. You have no time limitations on your turn, so you should be able to read all cards properly.

Make it a keyword? I was thinking about this, but the problem is the implementation. You see, card effect takes place first, keyword effect afterwards. It would be really awkward to make some card effect and then try to undo it. And also, as Myschly pointed out, to have or not have a keyword is not the same thing from the balancement point of view.

Make it a first line of the card text? Yeah, that could be done. How about "If not new... (some card effect)"?

Or just "No effect if New" in italics, maybe "NO EFFECT" in CAPS, which you can turn off ("CAPS on/off for 'No effect if New'"). Just first row is simplest solution, italics could work, CAPS could be annoying.

I noticed No effect if New isn't in the first row of White lotus just now. Thought it would be after the update?

(He got a phoenix he could afford and I panicked :P)

Nah, card oriented changes were left for the next update. This update was mainly done for migrating card database, plus we added things we already had implemented.