Samurai Anyone?

I just read the rules and joined...

Cheese!

That was a fun game but the game end was really weird. With open info, it was way too easy to see the outcome 3 turns in advance.

Basically, during my last turn I had to choose between giving the game to nestalawe or doho, OR to doho or myself. I think I could also have played to give the game to Gogolski.

I chose the second option, of course. :) But didn't win in the end. In effect, I just passed the Kingmaker decision to someone else.

I wonder how this could be solved?

PS: I'd like to play another game. Are you guys up for it?

I chose the second option, of course. :) But didn't win in the end. In effect, I just passed the Kingmaker decision to someone else.

I wonder how this could be solved?

A simple way to solve it would be, in this game, simply have each player draw one of the three totem type randomly that is kept hidden. So you know that each player has one mystery totem, but you don't know which.

I'm more concerned with 1st player advantage actually in Samurai (T & E has this problem also). The only simple way to overcome this that I could think of is to let the 1st player start with 3 tiles, and the second player 4, and then let them draw double per turn up to five. But I'm not sure if this really fixes Samurai, as your tiles draws are much more important early on in T&E (and since you can select your opening tiles in Samurai). Actually, I'm still tying to find a reason why you WOULDN'T pick your most powerful tiles and/or the boats to start with. The worst possible case is never getting a draw of your powerful tiles; picking them in your opening hands at least ensures that you will get to pay them, and with the replacement tile, you can play it twice.

The other thing about Samurai is that I've always thought that the 3 totem city was too powerful, the only way to play is to either go full bore and capture it all, or just ignore it, and let the other player spend six turns trying to capture it. I was pretty scared when I decided to let "implicit collusion" take over and let everyone else go after it; and then one player gets all three anyway (with only 2 tokens placed, IIRC).

I created a new game but we're still missing a player:

BGDF-dono IV