Seeing as red-bordered opportunity cards can be used even when one has zero actions remaining (because they automatically complete upon clicking the card), would it be possible to make it so that clicking such a card with actions remaining doesn’t consume an action? It’s already possible to play them for free by simply waiting until one has no actions remaining before clicking the card, and it feels kind of weird that there’s distinctly a "right" and a "wrong" way to use these cards from an action economy standpoint.
I’ve also noticed that at certain times it will refresh your action-refresh countdown. Particularly within a minute of two of getting your next action…
Well, your counter often "refreshes" in the sense of syncing itself with the server – the browser’s time can get inaccurate if you haven’t spent an action in a while. But using a red card will reset the timer to 10:00 if you have zero actions left.
Red-bordered cards are odd – and “gameable” so that the “right time” to use them is when you have zero actions and a timer as close to 10:00 as possible – and I suspect that’s because of vagaries of how FL works more than anything else.
They’re supposed to cost an action but they don’t at 0 actions because dipping into negative actions would be confusing.
Unlike other cards, they can’t disable themselves at 0 actions because it’s the branches that become disabled, not the cards themselves. They autofire rather than having branches, so they always have to be clickable.
I’m guessing that the timer reset at 0 actions is an attempt to make up for the fact that you can “use a red card for 0 actions” – an attempt to impose a cost. But it’s unfortunately also gameable if you wait for the timer, use up your actions, and then use the red card.
I’d suggest the way to resolve this snarl – and maybe make red cards more useful for designers & writers, since we hardly ever see new ones – would be to fix the third paragraph above. Rather than autofiring, red cards should simply ignore your click if you click on them while you have 0 actions – much as say, an opportunity card that requires Shadowy 106 will refuse the player entry if that quality drops below 106. You click on the card, the card says “wait a second, you don’t have the qualities to see this card” and you’re back looking at your hand again, with the card intact. I suspect this isn’t possible right now because Actions are not a quality that can be required for a card, so it’d be special-casey. But I like the idea of autofire cards and don’t like the idea of “you play in this weird stilted way to use a card for free” or kludges involving timer resets, so… they really ought to just always cost an action, or be unclickable if you don’t have an action.
I mean, either way would be an acceptable solution to me - either making them unclickable at 0 actions or making them always free. I just don’t like the fact that there’s a particular optimal way to play them and that the normal use case (i.e. clicking them when they come up) is actually suboptimal.
I’ve had -1 action due to desync and red cards, it was hilarious.