Hey All,
Thanks for your advice last time. I have another question, that I would appreciate ideas on:
The current game I'm working on ("For Science!!!"), players control teams of scientists, who are racing around a crashing space-ship, hoping to get their scientists to escape pods. Players get more points the longer their scientists stay on the ship (but then they run a higher risk of not escaping). Players play cards to gain short-term effects, and capture tokens on the board (I ended up calling them "prototype tokens") to gain powers and extra points. The game can end during any player's turn, and generally lasts ~10 turns.
Here's my problem: By acting earlier, I think you get a small jump on the other players. I think it's small, as it hasn't been obvious yet (although I'll admit, I haven't kept track of how often the first and last players win). But, if you are the last player to go, you generally get one fewer turn than the first player, so I feel like there must be some disadvantage. Right now I'm debating if I need to correct this, and if so, then how. Have any of you had this problem in the past? How do you determine when going first or last that it is problematic enough to need intervention? Also, if you have had this problem, what did you do to fix it? So far I've been brainstorming the following ideas:
1) Give later players a slightly better initial setup
2) When the game ends, if a finite victory point resource has not been exhausted, players are allowed to buy them. The player who went last gets the first opportunity, then it goes backwards (and thus, the first player is the least likely to be able to get said resources).
3) Later players begin the game with extra cards.
4) In the event of a draw, the last player to go wins.
5) Later players are given a point or two at the beginning.
Any thoughts?
Simon
Thanks for the comments so far.
I will start keeping a list of who wins any given game. There is a large amount of player interaction, so maybe that will tend to counteract any advantages. Also, I've noticed that not every player uses all of their turns to the fullest (since once all of your scientists have escaped the ship, you're often somewhat done).
At this point, it's not really feasible to give everyone a last turn. As it stands, the game ends either when the ship blows up (thus killing everyone left on board) or when the last escape pod launches (thus taking away any last opportunities to gain points). I might be able to tweek the first of those two endings, but I'm not really sure if it'd be worth the extra complications. Also, I'm a little hesitant to do a rolling turn order, as I think that would really complicate things.
I probably will do some sort of resource difference or bonus, although I wanted to ask, are there any games out there where turn order is a tie-breaker? What do people think of that?