Mistake 3: The Hand Passing Mechanic

Years ago, I spent a week's worth of inconsequential grad class sessions pondering the idea of a hand-passing game. The basic idea was that you had a hand of cards, each of which could be played to achieve some effect. At some point, you would pass your entire hand to the player on your left, thereby affecting their choices.

The Appeal
At the time I created this game, I was mired in creating game systems that had interesting interactions with the player, but didn't necessarily provide interesting opportunities for interactions between the players. I was finding ways to force this back in.

What a nice, fundamental way to affect someone else than to wholly provide them with all of their options. You would have to balance what you wanted to do against what you were providing them with. You could theoretically set them up with dangerous situations, different combinations of cards that might be disadventagous to their paticular situation.

The Office Idea
The original concept I used for this was that cards were tasks to be performed in an office. The board was, predictably, an office, with a series of spaces representing rooms. Each card told you a place you had to be, and a number of negative points (effort) that were incurred by playing that card. Your goals was to make a move that caused you to move onto another player's token, at which point you could shirk all (or some?) of your cards onto them, absolving yourself of the need to actually take on the negative points you would have gotten if you had played them yourself.

The Problem
Well, the basic problem was that there was no real game here. It was a cute idea, where I lept onto a conceit that took advantage of it, but nothing in terms of gameplay or fun really emerged.

More fundamentally, the problem with this mechanic is decision trees. You have enough on your plate worrying about you want to do, to have to get into another player's shoes, figure out what they want, balance not giving it to them against what you want. Its too much, especially in what is supposed to be a light game. It's not any fun.

Is the idea salvagable? I think maybe so, but I need:
* Very simple cards, which other players might be forced to use
* Your primary goal needs to be to mess other people up. If you're going to have to spend all this time looking at what the other players are going to do, that should be the main thrust. That's hard enough to play your moves, planning what someone else might do is really, really hard. It can't be something that you do as a side goal to advancing your own options.

I'm not sure what that would look like. I'm picturing something like Roborally, where you pass move cards to a player, trying to force them to hurtle into bad situations.

But how much control does the recipient have when they receive cards? If they can order 7 cards as they see fit, its pretty tough to really overtly enact your will on them in any effective way.

And is it any fun to have something forced on you this way?

My verdict for now: its an idea that sounds nice, but its flawed. Its a bad combination: you make basic choices, while another player makes the final choices. Trying to make that fun for the passing player is potentially impossible, and if you succeed, the recieving player is making false "final" decisions, and may not be having any fun.

Maybe its a thematic switch we need. Maybe you pass cards to a player who makes final choices with them, about *your* piece. But still, not all that fun.

Still a nice idea to have in the arsenal, just in case a situation ripe for it arises.