I don't think the rules explicitly state anything about this, but can you count the cards in a deck to determine if you want to end the game or not or maybe to see how many more rounds it could go?

My group doesn't allow counting but it gets brought up once in a while. BSW tells you how many cards are left in a stack. Do you or your group allow counting or not?

We always allow counting

You must be able to count the decks so you know whether you may use the Observatory or not.

I see nothing wrong with counting the remaining cards in each stack, though I suspect in practice this isn't done until one gets a sense that one or more are getting low.



Can you explain what you mean by this?

He must mean that you cannot take the last card by using the observatory.

Yes. If there is only 1 card left in a stack, you cannot take it with the Observatory. If there are 2 or more cards left, you can take the top 1. Hence, it must be legal to count how many cards are left in a stack.

Well, actually this only proves you can know when a deck contains just one card (you should draw the card using observatory without looking at it, if you see no more cards are in the deck then you put it back in the deck face down).

That said, we allow players to count the cards, too. Actually, in the italian translation of the rules we learned the game from, there's a note explicitly saying that any player can count the cards anytime (don't know where that note came from).

Ciao
Marco