A friend loaned me Battle Cry so I could find out if Julie enjoyed it or not, and whether it would be a good addition to the shelf. The good news is that, kind of surprisingly, she really did like it, despite not being too interested in war games in general. The bad news is, kind of surprisingly, is that between the cards and the dice, I felt too much luck was involved. I checked the Geek and the Frieks archive and didn't find any "tweaking" suggestions, just variants for adding terrain and bigger battles. In the 1st game, Julie couldn't roll the right kills to save her life (more precisely, her army's life) several times in a row, so when I finally got a Right Flank card, I was able to win with a die roll that better fit the averages. In our 2nd game, I could roll no wrong, wiping out a general with Sharp Shooter in the first turn and rolling beautifully the rest of the game. The 3rd game we tried with the tweak described below. When the score was my 5 flags to Julie's 4, with several of her units down to just the flag, she chose "All Out Offensive" and took out solo Infantry flag and then a full artillery unit with just 2 dice - yep, she rolled 2 Artillery on 2 dice. So that kind of made up for my 2nd game luck. In case you're wondering, the 1st 2 games were First Bull Run and the 3rd was Pea Ridge. Anyway, I wanted to tweak the game to achieve 3 goals: 1) Reduce the luck factor, or at least the "feel" of the luck factor, 2) Not eliminate luck (otherwise I could play Diplomacy), 3) not make the game any "heavier," otherwise it would lose its appeal to Julie (she'd never play Diplomacy). Below is the tweak I came up with. I'd love to hear other tweaks anyone else has, and your opinions on where my tweak might break down when used with 2 more experienced players. Given that we are not experienced wargamers AND this was our first time with Battle Cry, I am very open-minded about the idea that this tweak might break under more plays or more "unbalanced" scenarios. We basically just replaced the draw/discard mechanism with a card selection one. All of the cards were laid out face-up next to the gameboard. During his turn, a player would choose a card from all those available, play it, and then give it to his opponent who would put it face up in front of him. If a player chose to play a card from his stack in front of him, that card was placed face-down in a "discard" pile as both players had now executed that action. A player could not have more cards face-up in front of them than the hand size limit of the original rules. When given a card that would exceed this limit, a card had to be discarded. When all the "Regular Order" (Skirmish, Probe, Attack, Assault) cards had been played (i.e. a player had none to choose from, either in front of him or the general pool), all cards were simply laid out and available again. Finally, if you chose "All Out Offensive" you had to discard whatever cards you had in front of you. (Note: All Out Offensive does not "reset" the deck in this tweak.) Since Pea Ridge has balanced hand sizes, we needed nothing to address the start of the game. My idea for starting hand sizes is that the player with more cards could choose Skirmish, Probe or Attack cards to start with in front of them, with no overlap. This means where there is a 2-card difference the 2 cards could have nothing in common, either direction or type. So you couldn't choose 2 Lefts or 2 Attacks, but an Attack Left and Probe Center would be "legal" selections. What I like about the tweak is that I don't get stuck having no cards for the section I want to do something in, unless I caused that situation myself. I wonder if free access to the special cards isn't too powerful, but at least it's equally powerful. Another idea I had, but haven't tried, is separating the cards into 3 face-down decks, sorted by section (Left, Center, Right). Then the specialty cards would be randomly mixed in equally among these stacks - I think there would be one extra in one stack. Then for each turn you could draw from whichever stack best suited your battle plan. For one game with new players, the tweak seemed to work well. We'll try it again. I hope there's a few out there who give this a shot and let us know if it worked for you. If I don't see (or hear about) any terrible shortcomings, I'll post this as variant to the Geek. Thanks for reading the long missives I seem to be so good at. I get points for quantity at least, right? Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com