game adaptations & UI design choices

 as I guess it happens with every adaptation, at some point some questions come up and there are some design choices must to be made.

 in the case of board games adaptations, the questions surely should be about what elements of the physical game are going to migrate to its digital counterpart:

• is the board itself, also an element in the game?
• is the score board now part of the UI? are the stats? the inventory? etc.

 I’d like to be able to not use cards in this adaptation.  I don’t like the idea of using cards when the characteristic of them being cards is not pertinent — they are never shuffled, nor hold by any player (it’s an open information game) — there’s no concept of ‘hand’ or ‘deck’

 every other element in this game can be tackled like coding a chess game. but not the cards. probably someone out there already found an elegant solution, but I’m interested in experimenting and finding out what comes out of iterating.