Thoughts that I’ve had recently:
Alternative game ending mechanic: The special action of a 9 card is to provide votes, 1 each time it is played. Instead of ending the game when one of the piles has been exhausted, the game is over when one player reaches 20 votes. Or, instead of positive votes, council members provide ‘dings’, and once you receive 20 dings you are out. This would introduce an additional dimension to manipulate in the game and mitigate some of the gang up on the leader mechanic of the previous version of this objective. Cons include that it would introduce non-card components into the game, the horizon of the future remains very clear (creating 2nd place perception issues) and it would make the 9s pile very dull.
Card Type description: Ok, so I introduced characters, groups, fleets, planets and artifacts earlier as possible additional dynamics. I want to expand on this and integrate them into the existing game dimensions by using card type as the principle referent of card powers. If a card power specifies another card, or type, rather than referring to influence types or values, it would refer to card types. So, for example, there may be a military fleet card which states that you may remove one fleet card in another player’s discard pile from the game. Although every influence type (and value) has at least a few cards from each card type, certain card types would be favored by certain influence types (and values). So, military cards would tend to be fleets and planets. Religious cards would tend to be planets and characters, Political cards would tend to be characters and groups, Cultural cards would tend to be groups and artifacts and Economic cards would tend to be artifacts and fleets. So, to use the example from before, that military fleet power would tend to target other military cards or economic cards predominantly, though not exclusively. Alternately, each influence type could have 3 out of the 5 card types associated with it, as well as 2 ‘opposing’ types, which might influence areas that it has little or opposing influence on.
Having neutralized the significance of high value cards, it seems to me that it doesn’t really matter whether or not numbers are associated with specific types of card types. But, for the sake of creating an even distribution of influence types in each pile, numbers should be non-correlative. That nevertheless leaves unanswered the question of how to distribute powers to numbers. The simple answer so far has been to duplicate each power for each number. However, with the increased dimensionality created by introducing card types, it becomes a less viable solution. Is each power duplicated for each number and each card type? That allows for a lot of potential unique cards, but at the cost of an incredible amount of redundancy.
My initial feeling is that influence type tends to determine the type of power on a card (whether it is removing cards, discarding cards, searching for cards, canceling cards, etc…) depending upon how we interpret the impact of the power on the game. Influence type will also heavily influence the card type as above. However, once the card types associated with a particular power are determined, then there would be some guide for allocating numbers to card types. It could be as simple as assigning the 2/9 to one card type, the 3/7 to another and 4/5 to a third card type. If each influence type has 3 card types associated with it, then it would work out well for assigning numbers like this. The principle card type (let’s say characters for political) would be assigned the 2/9. The secondary card type (let’s say planets for military) would be assigned the 3/7 and the tertiary card type (let’s say groups for economic) would be assigned the 4/5 values. Provided that there are an equal number of powers associated with each influence type, each number pile would have an equal number of each card type and an equal number of each influence type. Table: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvpnhuJzFofXdEdBNmFMOWNqTk0xX2V3T0VDdDVoYmc&hl=en
The drawback with this particular configuration is that players would always know that a 2 character would be political, the 2 group would be cultural. Etc… Insofar as card powers effect specific card types this could introduce some degree of pile preference once players figure out which influence types have the best synergies with the card types. At the moment, the exact form of this cyclicity is not clear to me, but wherever there are discrete effects, there will emerge some favorable configuration as long as each combination is not represented. If it becomes a problem, we can simply shift the preferred card types around as long as the number of different card powers per influence type is a multiple of 5, to create a perfectly even distribution. This would, of course, also negate the particular card type affiliation for each influence type… but it would balance everything. My inclination is for some type of imbalance though, for three reasons: theme, cognitive simplification and meta-gaming. So, perhaps the cyclicity will not be pronounced enough to require any modification.
