Nathan Richardson
United States
Unspecified
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Using a deck of many duplicate cards to represent advances has never seemed like a good method. It's fiddly and inefficient. Now i'm making a PnP set of the 18-player expansion, and its becoming clear that printing 18 decks will be the most expensive part of the project. There must be a better way.
The way I see it, the advances cards have 3 roles.
1) they provide an easy way for players to get info about the advances.
2) they are a method for taking which advances each player has.
3) they give players a sense of ownership and progress.
I've come up with good ways to fulfill the first two roles without cards. A nice-looking spreadsheet up on the big screen in the game room or on a tablet, combined with a cheatsheet for each player with the advances descriptions, or maybe a shared set of cards.
but neither this not any of the other ideas I've come up with do a good job with #3-giving players a sense of progress. Empires rise and fall in Civ, cities burn, trade cards get used. The one permanent thing is advances. Getting and keeping cards demonstrates that. I'm not sure a checklist does.
Any ideas?
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Steve Bachman
United States
Colonie
New York
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The cards make it easier to set the limits of certain advances (e.g. Mysticism) each game.
How about creating a gameboard that illustrates each of the available advances with an empty space for each one. Each civ is limited to 11 advances, so you could create 11 markers for each civ. As they purchase an advance, they cover it up indicating it is no longer available for others. This would also give the players a convenient reminder - the dwindling stack of markers in stock - of how many more advances they can purchase.
You might even be able to include the purchasing credits in the chart, another benefit of the cards.
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Posted Sun Oct 16, 2011 2:45 pm
