From: Richard Heli <heli@best.com>
Subject: please add this info for RISE & FALL to your site

Variant for Rise and Fall
Suggested in a Review of the game by Peter Martin:

0. The turn after you bring a leader in the game, and on each
   succeeding turn, roll a die to see if he survives.  If the
   die roll is equal to or less than the number of turns the
   leader has been in the game, he dies.  You play that turn
   without a leader.  A new leader appears on your next turn
   during the Determine Status Phase AFTER you decide whether
   or not to leave the game.

1. Conduct the Income & Victory Point Phases simultaneously for all
   players rather than at the end of each player's turn.  This will
   prevent more than 1 player from scoring for the same region in a 
   turn.

2. Permit players to withdraw from an area before combat if the 
   Barbarian tries suicide attacks.  This will prevent a player from
   ahistorically using, say, the Picts to soften up the Romans, then
   quit the game and come back as a West African barbarian which could
   directly benefit.

3. Make ships twice the price to build, leaving the maintenance cost
   the same.  Ships must also wait one turn before they can be deployed.
   Apparently Mr. Martin feels this is more realistic.  Unfortunately,
   the game does not indicate any time scale.

4. Only permit players to choose their leader once per game.  (Realism)

5. To determine the intrinsic strength of an independent barbarian area,
   use the economic value.  Areas with no economic value have 1 army.
   This seems more realistic and allows better strategy than rolling up
   a highly variable number of armies each time.

This information interpolated from a review of the game in the magazine
FIRE AND MOVEMENT, the April-May 1990 issue.