End game triggers/problems

Hi All! Thanks for all the input so far! I thought I would give you all a few more details to help you see the issues:

The main resources in the game are cubes which come from dice. A player gets the color and number of cubes corresponding to the dice(eg. a 3 red dice would net you 3 red cubes). There are 6 different colors of dice and 18 total. You use these cubes to buy stuff.

So to answer anonymousmagic, the endgame is unavoidable as you need resources to do anything thus you must select dice, which thus eventually triggers the end of the game (when 10 out of the 18 dice are selected a round/the game ends).

Now you go around with a boat with limited space on it(12 or 15 if you upgrade). So simply doubling a dice doesn't work...especially since you need different combinations of colors to buy things. (responding to X3M and why I needed ot give more info).

Now the reason why ending the game immediately doesn't work is that there is also an "extra actions" track that each player has. A player gets 3 base actions(which they can move to islands and select dice with) which can get upgraded to 4 actions per turn. If a player saves up 5 extra actions on top of this A player could potentially could grab 6 dice in one turn to push the end of the game and leave players before them stuck with alot of unused goods. If players see the potential for this and use their goods up later players in turn order can stock up on the good dice(4-5-6) and just make sure they stay beneath the 10 threshold so they for sure get another turn to use all these resources.

I would be a fan of the "finish the round" option if I can find an intuitive way to limit the amount of extra actions gotten. (Maybe max the track at 4?).

Kos's "cash in round" ideas sounds decent too! Maybe have a "when the 10 dice is selected everyone gets another turn including the dice grabber and then finish the round so that every player has an equal amount of turns". This would lead the max/min issues to just the final round. As grabbing the 10th and up dice would be desirable as by that time there are usually only a few "good" dice left. I will likely try this option next playtest. If it makes the game too long I may just have to scale it down a bit(maybe rounds end after 9 dice or something like that).

The game does have some long vs. short game aspects. If you go for contracts directly they give direct payouts in both points and flexibility(eg. 15 points, 2 wild cubes, and 1 extra action). Whereas there are also tech tiles that give you more staggered abilities and points(eg. 1 wild cube whenever you select a red dice) Points for these tech tiles square and so you need to get a lot of them to make them pay off points wise.

Players have to determine the best way to approach the game: build up tech and get points that way, then use those tech abilities to grab some choice contracts later. Or players can focus on contracts directly and use the immediate benefits to continue to go after contracts. Or get a few helpful techs, and then use these to focus on contracts. On top of this there are also workers you can hire that act like the tech tiles but are all points related(eg. 5 points every time you select a red dice).

Balancing is coming slowly but surely as there is a lot to juggle! I am still learning about the game and possible strategies 30 playtests in! While I don't mind discovering balancing issues, I hate discovering "fun killing: issues, which is why I posted this here. These end game issues don't happen all the time but enough that they need to be fixed! Thus the beauty of the bgdforums!

Thanks for the help guys! Any future thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

PS- I have the game available as a PnP if anyone is interested but it is a beast to print off!

No, resources won't really work Beggarking. I am still pretty new to this site so I haven't figured out how to upload rulebooks and such.

Basic game is this: The board has two halves, the ocean with the dice islands on one half(9 islands, 2 dice per island) and the mainland with villages on the other half(13 villages each with a tile on it that has a 3 cube price on the tile).

Every turn a player gets three actions with their boat and their cart. The boat travels around the islands and each movement between them costs 1 action, and each dice selected costs 1 action. Cubes are placed in ones boat(on a personal player board) when dice are selected. Cubes are brought back to mainland and transferred onto the cart and then brought to villages where the cubes are exchanged for the tiles there. Tiles fulfill contracts or give a player special abilities, etc.

So on your turn you are looking at different color combinations for tiles on the mainland and then using your boat to go get the resources and then bringing them back to shore to go collect those tiles.

18 dice are rolled and placed on the islands. You get the number and color of the dice you select(eg if you select a purple 6 dice you would get 6 purple dice and place them on your boat which has a max capacity of 12). As a round progresses more and more dice get pulled off the islands so there are less options available to pick from. When 10 dice get pulled off the board it is the end of a round. All the dice are then pulled off and all get rolled and the islands all get reseeded again.

Not sure if this helps at all but thought I'd give it a shot!

You have understood the dynamic correctly! There is an early mad dash for the big dice, especially ones that match the colors of tiles that are close together in the villages(eg. if there is one tile that costs 2 purple and 1 blue, and one next to it that costs 1 purple 1 blue and 1 red, and one next to that that costs 2 red and 1 blue then if there is a red/purple pairing on an island it will be desired). And as a round goes on there is less and less good options available. However, there are multiple die rounds in a game so this excitement comes back every round. It is very similar to Castles of Burgundy in this regard: Every round all the new tiles(or dice in my game) are shown and there is a mad dash for the best ones at the start, and then making the best with the rest after that. There's also that same element of figuring out what might be left over after the mad dash that affects what you pick right off the bat.

The tension builds throughout the game through the tech tiles gained or the contracts gained. Off the start you only have the resources on the islands to do stuff with but as you gain techs and contracts you gain access to wild cubes(cubes that can be used as any color) and extra actions. So at the start your possibilities are very narrow as you are limited to a very few tiles that you can buy, but as the game ramps up and if you play wisely you may have 5 extra actions and 5 wilds to work with by the end which means you can virtually purchase any pair of tiles on the board.

My first couple rounds of balancing has been to scale down the amount of wilds and extra actions that come into the game. It gets too chaotic and un-strategic if you can simply buy whatever you want. However, the concept of wild cubes and extra actions adds a lot of possibilities and fun into the game as well and want to keep them in. It has been a lot of work to balance this. I still may need to balance the extra actions aspect some more yet though for reasons mentioned above.

I have considered a pirate, but not as an AI but player controlled. My idea was that players could use actions to move the pirate around who would shut down certain routes/islands thus slowing players down from getting dice from those islands. However, this is a very "euro" game and I didn't want there to be any direct confrontation in this way.

Yes, I have been playtesting this quite a bit to try to figure it out just by playing it. I think I will try what I mentioned above and see if it works.

Thanks for the input!