Introducing Ranstax! 🎲 #1
erikhuizinga
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👉 https://erikhuizinga.github.io/ranstax/ 👈
About Ranstax
Ranstax enables you to play board games like Wingspan, Everdell and Carcassonne with separate stacks for each expansion or module. This means a simpler and shorter setup, less shuffling and more modularity! All expansions and modules can remain separated, forever!
How does Ranstax work?
Just select the stacks to play with, shuffle them separately, and use Ranstax whenever you have to draw any number of items. It's that easy!
It helps if you mark your stacks, e.g. by putting a specific colour game component (e.g. an unused resource token or meeple) next to each. Then enter the stack names and sizes in Ranstax using an emoji that matches the marked stack. For example for Wingspan plus expansions:
💙 North America: 180 (170 + 10 from the Swift Start pack)
💜 Europe: 81
💛 Oceania: 95
❤️ Asia: 90
Whenever you need to draw anything during game setup or the game, you just press a number button in Ranstax to draw that many. Ranstax will randomly draw from every stack, taking into account their changing sizes like in a real mixed deck! The history tells you from which stacks items were drawn and then you simply draw from them.
What can you and I do to improve Ranstax?
Please give Ranstax a few tries. Congratulations, you're an early adopter now!
For example, you could try the following:
Thank you for being a player, contributor or supporter! ❤️ 🎲 🃏 🍀
Questions
Q: What about discard piles, if any?
A: Keep them separate too. Just put discarded items next to the corresponding draw pile. This way all stacks can remain separated when packing up the game.
Q: How is the shuffling faster/easier if I have to now shuffle multiple smaller stacks separately?
A: See this discussion about shuffling large numbers of cards. Summary: properly shuffling decks becomes much harder with increasing deck size, so the smaller the decks, the faster it becomes, especially if you have multiple smaller decks. The added value is also in not having to ever (un)merge your decks again!
Q: Wouldn't drawing from a specific pile reveal information about the drawn item?
A: Yes and no. You know from which set the item comes, but what does that really tell you? It's only one of many possible items. I don't recommend using Ranstax with stacks of fewer than, say, 10 items, because of this reason. However, if the stack is just 10 items or less, it would be as simple to not use Ranstax and just shuffle these items with another stack to form a big enough one. Also, in some games this doesn't even matter, e.g. in Carcassonne where a drawn tile is immediately revealed.
Q: What if a stack runs out?
A: Just continue. Ranstax won't draw from a stack that reached zero size. Without Ranstax, i.e. with everything in one big stack, you would also continue drawing from that big stack, even if a subset of it ran out.
Got other questions? Let me know in a reply and I might edit this post to include them here. 😀
You can also reach out to me on BGG or Twitter.
I hope that you'll find Ranstax useful, and to hear from you if you have any feedback! Thank you.
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