Hand Limit

1 Following

• Abyss:
  • The Commander gives each opponent a hand limit of 6, which makes it more awkward for them to pay for Lords. In particular, it discourages them from holding a lot of low-value Allies. When you recruit him, your opponents have to discard down to 6. They are allowed to go above 6 during their turn, but must discard any excess ones at the end of turn.
  • The Leviathan Expansion Pack introduces the "Martial Law" rule of giving each player a hand limit of 12 Allies at all times. Later, this rule was added to the main game.
• In The Captain Is Dead, character cards list each character's hand limit, counting Skill and Tool cards, but not Battle Plans. Excess cards must be discarded immediately. Most characters have a hand limit of 6 cards, but hand limits range from 4 (Ensign) to 8 (Counselor or Hologram).
• Downplayed in Catan, which has a soft cap of 7 resource cards per hand that isn't immediately enforced. Instead, if you have more than 7 cards, you risk losing a full half of them if anyone at the table (including yourself) rolls a 7 on the start-of-turn dice roll. Given how 7 is the most likely outcome of a 2d6 roll, it is a potentially high-risk, high-reward strategy if you are saving up resources for a major building spree. One expansion allows rising the hand limit.
• Everdell has a strict hand limit of 8. If you would draw another card, you just don't. Not only does this prevent you from hoarding cards, which among other things makes it harder to spam high-value "Journey" actions in the endgame, but it means that you have to find a way to get rid of unwanted cards if you don't want them to keep clogging up your hand. Reaching the limit also makes cards with a "give cards to an opponent" effects more useful for your opponents — any cards given to you will just go straight to the discard pile instead of benefitting someone. Note that some of the variable player powers in the expansions increase the hand limit, such as the Butterfly having a limit of 12.
• Forbidden Island limits you to five Treasure and Special Action cards in your hand, and any excess cards must be discarded immediately. This makes it challenging to collect a set of four identical Treasure cards to be exchanged for an actual Treasure. While you can get back a copy of a discarded card, it may require going through the deck again, which makes the situation of the sinking island more perilous. With that said, the game does have an Anti-Frustration Feature in that if you exceed the hand limit with Special Action cards in your hand, you may use them instead of discarding them.
• Forbidden Sky limits each player to holding 3 tiles at once, at which point they can't draw more until they place some. This forces the players to place tiles instead of drawing until they find the most useful ones. The Surveyor has a bit more freedom with his 4 slots.
• Jaipur has a hand limit of 7 (excluding camels) cards at the end of a player's turn. This makes it more challenging to collect large sets, which yield a larger Set Bonus.
• Pandemic limits the number of city cards a player can hold in their hand to seven (eight for the Archivist, whose other ability lets them grab cards from the discard pile). This forces you to discard excess cards unless expended or given to another player before the end of your turn. As losing too many cards means losing the game, this puts the players into a crisis mindset that the game is predicated upon.
• Ticket to Ride: While nothing prevents a player from holding as many cards as they'd like (bar the extraordinary event where the entire draw pile is taken), the Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation has an achievement for winning a game on the US map without exceeding ten cards in hand at any time.
• In Takenoko, the player is only allowed to have 5 untriggered victory conditions in their hand at the same time, and can only draw more once some of those are triggered.

Card Games

• In Chinchon, each player is only allowed to have up to seven cards, and every time a card is drawn, another must be discarded.
• Don't Press That Mine Turtle: All players can only have three cards in their hand. If they desire different cards from the ones in their hands, they may discard them and draw new ones, but they have to press the Mine Turtle once if so.
• Fluxx has the "Hand Limit 0/1/2/..." New Rule cards. When played, the non-active players must discard down to it, and as long as the rule remains in play, the active player must discard down to the limit at the end of their turn. The higher limits mostly serve to ruin a card hoarder's day, while the lower ones are prone to creating chaos by forcing people to play cards they'd rather not play.
• Munchkin (Steve Jackson): Players are allowed to have only 5 cards in their hand unless they are a Dwarf, in which case they can have 6, or otherwise have a cheat card that lets them hold more cards. Anything over the limit must be discarded, either to the discard pile or given to the lowest level player, at the end of each turn. However, like so much in Munchkin, Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught is very much in play — if nobody counts your cards, or if you manage to disguise how much you have in your hand, it's ... well, not strictly legal, but the rules turn a blind eye. Of course if you do get caught, the forfeit happens immediately, and in some house rules, the other players then get to dictate which cards are discarded.
• Regicide: Players have a maximum limit of cards they can have in their hand, depending on the number of players (5 cards for 4 players, 6 cards for 3, 7 cards for 2, and 8 cards for solo play). This rule also applies when the Diamond suit power is activated, as players can only refill to their max hand size. For example, in a 3-player game where a player plays the 7 of Diamonds and has 3 cards left in hand, they can only draw 3 cards from the Tavern deck, as it will fill their deck to the maximum limit.

Trading Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering has a hand limit of 7, and you discard down at the end of your turn. A few cards interact with it, such as Reliquary Tower lifting the rule for its owner. A particularly nasty one is Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, which under normal circumstances sets your opponents' hand limit to zero — if they can't kill him before the end of their next turn, they'll be left topdecking.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has a hand limit of 6, which is enforced at the end of a player's turn. A few cards interact with it, such as "Enervating Mist" decreasing your opponent's hand size to 5, "Hieroglyph Lithograph" permanently increasing the user's hand limit to 7 at the cost of 1,000 Life Points, and "Infinite Cards" lifting the hand size limit for both players. But such cards have rarely ever seen play, and the least uncommon, Hieroglyph Lithograph, is mainly used in Suicide Decks.^note "Infinite Cards" would most likely see use in decks that have "Slifer"- its attack goes up by 1000 for each card in the controller's hand; keeping the standard limit means it's capped at 6000, which is usually enough, but there can be situations where you would want it to go higher (especially against newer cards the start with a high default attack).

• Genshin Impact: Genius Invokation TCG: You can only hold 10 Action Cards in your hand; any new card gained when your hand already has 10 will be lost.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: The normal hand size limit is 10, which can be increased to 11 or 12 with certain card effects. Any cards drawn when the hand is full will be burned, which, since Hearthstone doesn't have any kind of discard pile, means overdrawn cards are removed from the match entirely and can't be recovered.
• Marvel Snap: Hand limit is 7, fixed from game to game due to the mobile game platform focus, the small number of cards in each deck, and the short gameplay length.
• Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes: Every turn, you draw a new card, unless you already have 10. However, you can add more through cards that let you draw extra from your deck, or ones that Conjure up new cards for you.
• Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket: Unlike the physical card game, which has no hand limit, TCG Pocket caps your hands size at 10. If you have more than 10 cards at the end of your turn, you must discard until you're down to 10.

Deckbuilding Games

• Balatro: By default, you have a hand limit of eight cards, though some decks have a different limit and this number can be increased or decreased with various different vouchers, Jokers and Spectral Cards.
• In Slay the Spire, you have a hand limit of 10 cards which cannot be increased. Any card-draw effect that occurs when the player has 10 cards in hand is negated.
• Touhou Lost Branch Of Legend: The starting limit of cards in hand is 10. Any cards that would be drawn after that just aren't. The only way to increase it is the card Fairy Assembly, which increases it to 12. This card is given to Cirno, who has a lot of cards that stay in your hand after being played.

• In the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga/anime, the lack of a hand limit lets Yugi defeat an otherwise unbeatable combo. His Ghoul opponent has a card in play that lets him draw cards for every monster that regenerates, another that removes hand size limits, uses the Sky Dragon (which automatically attacks a newly-summoned monster and whose stats increase for every card in the owner's hand) as well as a weak slime monster that dies to intercept attacks but regenerates when killed. Yugi's solution is to play a mind-control card on the slime, causing the dragon to attack the slime. The slime regenerates, still under Yugi's control, causing the Ghoul to draw cards and the dragon to attack again, the slime dies and regenerates, the Ghoul draws more cards... and as Yugi points out, the Ghoul is now in an endless loop of drawing cards until he's out, at which point he automatically loses the game, letting Yugi claim the card.