Sometimes game design means being annoyed at how prime factorization works. Sometimes I want to be able to evenly distribute a number of cards between players. But player counts are variable. A set of 12 cards can be split between 2, 3, 4 or 6 players. But 5 players? You're fucked.
Any number you pick below 60 leaves things dividing unevenly at some player count.
Which means you always have to design around this mathematical quirk. You have to make it so some player get more or fewer cards, or some cards aren't used every game, or 60 is a reasonable number of cards.
@nickwedig This may sound facile, but... what if you came up with something fun to do with the undistributed cards?
@AudreyWinter That might work, and there are other solutions that can be done.
I'm mostly just thinking about how this is an issue that shows up regularly in game design, and how there's nothing you can really do to change that fact.
@nickwedig I've recently made a party game with almost no prep, for a quick gameplay with only a couple of rules. I needed like 1500 words to write it down (and barely made it into two horizontal A4 pages).
Any other constraint is debatable or negotiable. If you start making a one-page RPG but it gets too bloated? Then you can abandon the one-page limit and make it a bit longer. If a publisher hired you to write 2000 words of setting lore, you can try to convince them to change it to 3000... or make it a new game mechanic to reinforce the setting in a different way. (You'll probably fail, but you can try.)
But math is math. It's a constraint you can't modify, now matter how much you want it to.