What causes a hand not discarding down to the limit in a card game?

End-of-turn cleanup never checks hand size, so cards drawn from extra effects push the hand above the cap without forcing the player to discard.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Hand Not Discarding Down to the Limit in a Card Game

Quick answer: Add an end-of-turn cleanup step that, while the hand exceeds the limit, requires the player to discard until the count meets the cap.

A hand-size limit only matters if something enforces it. Without a discard step, draw effects let hands balloon past the cap. Here is how to add the cleanup.

How to fix it

1. Check size in end-of-turn cleanup

During the cleanup phase, compare the hand count to the limit. If it is over, enter a discard-required state instead of advancing the turn.

2. Prompt forced discards

While over the limit, prompt the player to choose a card to discard, moving it to the discard pile, and re-check after each one until the hand is at or below the cap.

3. Handle no-choice cases

If all remaining cards are undiscardable, define a fallback rule so cleanup cannot deadlock the turn waiting on an impossible discard.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Construct 3 error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The bug you can't reproduce isn't gone — it's just invisible until you capture it from the player's device.