ZunTzu

I successfully made a module over the last few days after a lot of trial and error. I'm using the system to prototype a game concept I have. It's a tile-laying city-building game ala Carcassonne.

One "bug" that I can't seem to work out is that my tiles, if they get accidentally nudged, come to the top of the table and obscure the counters or meeples that are supposed to be on top of them.

I noticed that in the Carcassonne and Lost Patrol gameboxes that the tiles are defined using <counter-sheet> and subdivided using <card-section>. The meeples are created using <counter-sheet> and subdivided using <counter-section>. These gameboxes don't have this "bug". Thus, it seems to me that counters always stay on top of cards.

The problem is that when I try to use <card-section> to divide my cards, it doesn't use my mask file properly.

I suppose I could fix it by defining my tile backs the same way these two modules do, but right now I'm not sure that my tile backs will always be identical, so I've defined separate tile front and back images and masks.

So, before I compromise on this, is there an easier way to define one set of counters such that it always stays on top?

Tikal has this problem too, but even worse. In that game, you need to stack a large, medium and small piece, and it's easy for them to get accidentally rearranged into some other order. Our solution was to use the undo function anytime this happened. It would be nice if there was a priority tag or some other way to enforce stacking order.

Hi!

There is no way to prevent different types of counters to stack together, but you can disable stacking using this icon:

As an alternative you can implement the tiles as playing cards. Counters and cards don't stack together.
If you don't want cards to share the same back define one card-section per card.

You could also use terrains. Terrains are displayed underneath counters and stacks. They never stack. They can be 'locked' at a location. I'm not sure terrains would be the best choice for a game such as Carcassonne though, because they are not as easy to move around as counters or cards.