Monday, March 08, 2010

Eminent Domain playtest

Two weeks ago I had an idea to try and improve Eminent Domain by combining the Trade and Harvest roles into 1 card. Tonight I finally tried the game again - 2-player with Tyler - and we used that new rule. I think it worked very well.

Instead of having to fill your deck with a bunch of Harvest cards AND a bunch of Trade cards in order to execute a trading strategy, we could simply get 1 card in your deck that did both. I liked the dynamic. I didn't make any change to the symbols - they still either help Trade OR Harvest, depending on the icon. I think that's probably OK.

The worst part about this change is that in order to maintain a starting deck of 10 cards (2 of each action) then I have to include Warfare in the starting deck. I have been playing with just Colonize, Survey, Research, Trade, and Harvest in the starting deck, which I thought went a long way toward balancing Warfare with Colonize (otherwise Warfare seems much easier to use than Colonize). So now I either have to reconfigure the starting deck (but I like 2 of each card - it's simple and symmetric), start with only 8 cards per deck (not sure I like that because a 4 card hand would probably be too small, and a 5 card hand doesn't mesh well with an 8 card deck), OR... maybe come up with another 6th action to add to the game.

So what action, if any, could be added? Maybe Politics... but what would it do? I like Politics being in the game, but I don't think I like Politics being another route to victory. I almost think maybe Politics cards should be sort of Wild, counting for any action... is that crazy? Should there be an action for the card? If so, what would it be? I'm open to suggestions...

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