Ralph T
United States
Signal Hill
California
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It took a play to see what another poster had mentioned. There are some balance problems with the bonus cards. Also as Bruno Faidutti mentioned, there is not much of a chance of the game ending because of the last scoring card being played.
The two bonus cards which are badly overpowered are the coins and goods cards. All of the landform bonus cards are not likely to net more than 8 points per player, more likely 6 or 7 in a 4 player game. The coins and goods cards, on the other hand are very easy to give more than 9 points--12 or more most likely, as you cannot really force a player to spend coins.
I suggest changing the coin bonus card to be 1 point per coin and the goods card to 2 points per good card. This will bring them in line with the other cards.
The other issue is the 16 scoring cards. There are simply too many for the game to end this way. Fauidutti recommended removing deck 3. Whether you follow his variant or don't change anything, the sheer number of scoring cards actually causes a balance problem.
If you look at the goods on the scoring cards, decks 1 and 3 make up all eight goods. Deck 2 is another eight cards and comprises these eight different goods again. What this means is the goods on deck 3 are likely to come up only once in the game (because the deck 3 cards are unlikely to come up), while the ones on deck 1 are likely to come up twice as often. I suggest removing four deck 2 scoring cards before the beginning of the game. This will limit the game to 12 rounds and make it impossible to tell which goods are going to come up more frequently than others, because the goods in deck 3 are now likely to come up.
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I thought the same way about the coin bonus card at first. After a lot of games i can say that this card isn‘t overpowered. In opposite: it is hard to win with it.
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Ralph T
United States
Signal Hill
California
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We tried it with the variant. It is entirely appropriate to remove four "deck 2" scoring cards. Reducing the points on the coin and goods bonus cards seemed to do the trick. The player who took the coin card had saved up 11 coins. He was also able to collect the most goods (3) but no one took the goods bonus card.
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Jacob Lee
Canada
Victoria
British Columbia
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I've only played once, but I felt a balance problem with the cards as well. My solution, which I've only tried once, was to remove the deck 1 cards and some of the deck 2 cards. The big problem for me in the first game was that people were bonus points for a completely random card. It's not like someone was planning to capitalize on a card - it just happened. Someone would, by chance, have placed a building in one of the three spots on the card. So I removed any cards which had the three locations on them which included all of deck 1 and some of deck 2. What remained was an equal distribution of cards that rewarded city quarters and commodities. So go through the new deck and reshuffle once you get to the bottom.
The other change we made, but this was accidental, was I forgot to use the scoring cards at the start of the game. I don't know how many rounds in we were, but once I realized this I brought it up and the solution was to introduce the scoring cards once someone built inside the city walls (the 5/3 regions). This worked beautifully and I would probably play this way next time, but truthfully, the game isn't awesome so I'm not looking to bring it out anytime soon. I've only played Ticket to Ride a few times and I like this better, but it doesn't grab me.
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Steve Duff
Canada
Ottawa
Ontario
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Seems like there's an assumption here that the game is supposed to end by using all the scoring cards. I think that's a faulty assumption, I think the game is supposed to end by players building businesses. The "stop if you use all scoring cards" is just a catch all, to make sure the game eventually ends, if the players suck at building.
EmperorJacob wrote: The big problem for me in the first game was that people were bonus points for a completely random card. It's not like someone was planning to capitalize on a card - it just happened. Someone would, by chance, have placed a building in one of the three spots on the card.
Why would it be random? You know the bonus card that's going to score currently. You see the bonus, you have the entire round to make sure you get there in order to score. It sure as hell shouldn't be random.
Further, you know each river is going to score multiple times in the game, so that shouldn't be a surprise either. That's probably why you built there in the first place, so that you would get points for it when that scoring location happens.
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Ralph T
United States
Signal Hill
California
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A random four of the "2" scoring cards should be removed however. If you don't remove them, it's likely you won't get past the first "3" scoring card, and the four trade goods on the "3" cards are objectively worse than the four trade goods on the "1" scoring cards. The latter have a chance of appearing twice in the game if you don't remove four "2", while the "3" trade good cards will only appear once.
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Posted Sat Mar 5, 2011 1:15 am
