Steffan O'Sullivan - 08:09pm Sep 12, 2003 PST (#7181 of 7206) Plymouth, NH, USA - http://www.panix.com/~sos/gviews.html Medieval from GMT: Overall, this is a good game that is close to a Euro in feel. There are really only two things our group doesn't like about the game: Time to play is too long for my group: it takes us 3+ hours to play, every time. We don't like all the "roll 2d6 and look up on a table" for Disaster and Ruler Change cards. These two types of cards make up almost a quarter of the Action deck, and are mandatory cards. It's just a tedious mechanism when used so frequently (though I enjoy it in games where it's used sparsely). There are other issues, beaten to death, about the component problems, but that doesn't bother my group very much. We do wish the map were larger and we use colored cubes (and more of them than the counters provided), but that issue is outside my consideration here. Here are two proposed fixes to these problems that I plan to institute the next time we play. They are unplaytested as of this time, and may be terrible for all I know - be warned. They are also much wordier than they need to be - sorry, I'm trying to be precise, and will simplify later. Length of game: to shorten the game, I'm going to the do the following steps: Remove the seven Mongol cards from the Action deck. Put one in the box - don't use it in the game. Lay out map cards and choose starting Powers as normal. Shuffle the leftover Powers into the Action deck, but leave the Mongol cards out at this point. Roughly cut the Action deck in half - don't be exact about it. Roughly cut one of the ~half Action deck piles into half - don't be exact about it. Set aside what is now roughly one quarter of the Action deck. Shuffle the remaining three-quarters of the Action deck together with FIVE of the Mongol cards. Place the remaining Mongol card on top of the ~quarter Action deck stack and set it aside for now. Play with only the ~3/4 Action deck. Once three Mongol cards have been drawn, shuffle them back into this deck. At that point, place this reshuffled portion of the Action deck on top of the ~quarter Action deck with the Mongol card on top. Continue play with the entire remaining deck. Once the final Mongol card has been played (the one that was placed on top of the ~quarter Action deck), the game ends with the draw of the next Power card, as per the rules. (The only difference is that in this shorter version, it will be the sixth Mongol to attack the map instead of the seventh.) I expect this to shorten the game to under two hours. We'll see. Actually, I may need to cut it down to five Mongols, but I'll try six first. Roll 2d6 and look up on a table: to get rid of this overused mechanic, I'm going to try the following: Players are required to keep their ruler tokens in three columns from left to right: +1, 0, -1. Players may stack the appropriate Power cards under these columns in any order they want. They may rearrange the order (within a given stack) only during their action phase, if they do not collect income. They may also rearrange a column when there is a Change of Ruler. When a player plays a Disaster or Change of Ruler card, do not roll 2d6 as per the rules. Instead, the player playing the card chooses a "#1" player and rolls one die. If a "1" is rolled, the "#1" player (a role which can change each time) is affected by the card. If a "2" is rolled, the player to his left is affected. If a "3" is rolled, the player two places to the left of #1 is affected, and so on. Thus in a five-player game, one player will be affected one third of the time: on a die roll of 1 or 6. In a three-player game, each player has an equal chance of being affected by the die roll. Once you've determined which player is affected, the person playing the Action card must then choose a Power card of the affected player. If a "1" is rolled, that Power is affected with the Disaster or Change of Ruler. If a "2" is rolled, the card below the #1 Power in the same column is affected - or the first card in the next column, if it's the bottom card in the column. (The +1 column is considered the "next" column after the -1 column.) Continue counting for rolls of 3-6, but skip any Power with a Disaster marker when rolling for another Disaster. Thus a player with only four Power cards will have two of them twice as likely to be hit as the other two Power cards. This system still allows for a random roll, but gives the player playing the card a chance to skew the odds a bit. Note that this will go against the game designer's intention: the Holy Roman Empire is targeted most frequently in the chart provided, probably because it's the most powerful card in the game, and so on for other cards. Using this system, however, the current leader will generally be targeted more often than not, so hopefully it works out to the same thing: even out the Powers a bit. I'll let you know how it goes when I try it - if you try it, please let me know what you think! -Steffan