Update on "High Council of Evensford"

Brykovian wrote:

Sure. From the workshop, there were comments on rechecking the VP balances which I did. Similarly there were some comments regarding people taking over people's buildings. As a result I added an optional rule which Face2Face game prefer which repklaces that rule by stating that you can't start a new building or house if you already have 2 unfinished buildings.

The most important change however was that I then believed in the game more from the unbiased comments I received.

The main changes I am considering and need to playtest now include:

1. Event cards do not have to be played immediately.

2. In drawing cards from the Research or Production decks, you really are at the whim of the deck to a large extent. As it was, you had to use trading and a broad techniology base to help against this. I am now looking to include bit more player input into this process. For example I'm looking at having the top 3 (or 2?) cards of each deck face-up where a player chooses one of those, or the top face-down card.

This also has implications on drawing event cards where I've included a few tweaks. I'm also testing that a player can discard one of the face up cards when they play an event card from that deck (encouraging more turnover of face-up cards).

3. I have added special abilities to all buildings now rather than just the low tech buildings. (The high tceh buildings previously just provided VPs). For example, the Guid Hall might allow you to force a 1 for 1 card tarde with another player once per turn, while the museum might let you discard two owned research cards for an extra production action.

- Bill

Hi,

I've been playtesting the changes suggested by Face2Face Games and find that they do improve the game, particularly by offering more player choice. However, they have also slowed the game down as each player takes longer on their turns and the downtime has increased accordingly, exasperated by the fact that more choice of cards for players means less need to trade cards with other players.

As such here are my changes to speed the game back up, which seem to working in the later playtests, but still need some further work:

1. Change the research deck composition to remove wild cards (making trading more beneficial) and increase the high level tech cards (making high tech more accessible an dincreasing the technologydiversity between players, thus adding to the ijportance of trading for production cards).

2. Trading and purchasing technology can only be done when it is NOT your turn. This means there are things that you can't do when it is your turn and also cuts down the thinking of options during a turn without significantly impacting on their decision tree (just forces them to think about some parts of it outside their turn, thus speeding up their own turns).

3. (to be tested) Increase starting hands by 1 Research and 1 Production card.

I'm also still fine-tuning the powers for the high level buildings.

Talk later,
Bill