Friday, April 08, 2011

Eminent Domain: Exotic Expansion - take 2

I updated my EmDo prototype as discussed, and Michael played it 6 times with John tonight. I don't think John has grokked the game with the expansion yet, as Mike beat him every time. I was playing Carson City on the next table, but every time I looked up Mike seemed to have nothing but Exotic planets in play, and I guess he was using them to great benefit. One game he traded for 25 points - all from trading Fighters via Dr Mayhem's Weapon Emporium! This has given Mike something of a big head, as apparently he's 13-0 at EmDo with the Exotic expansion!

From those games, my current thought is that the Exotic icons do pretty much what they're supposed to, but I think they might snowball a little too quickly or easily. That might be less true with more players than it is with 2, or it might just be a perception thing, but I think I might need to nerf the planets a little bit. I might remove the Exotic icon from the planets which have the [Exotic]=>[X] abilities (and maybe add a couple of influence points to them) and put them back on the 3 planets which have no ability (but do have resource slots). I had wanted to add more icons so that people could get them and use them, I didn't want someone getting an Exotic planet and then not be able to do anything with the transform ability. But in fact, no matter which Exotic planet you get, you do have access to the Exotic technology cards - which each have an Exotic icon on them. So maybe just three planets with Exotic icons is enough. It may be disappointing to come across one of those without an ability to use the icon with, but those 3 planets will have 2 resource slots each, so they'll still be plenty useful. And maybe they'll encourage players to Survey up another Exotic planet!

Another idea I'd like to try is adding some more Tech cards. In particular, maybe a card that you play as an action which allows you to play 2 other cards, like the Village in Dominion. Amusingly, there's already a card like Smithy in this game (Improved Survey), and Moat (Survey) :)

I'm not sure if I want to add a lot of these types of things, but I'm currently thinking I could add 2 of these cards to each level 1 Tech deck. Each could have 1 of the icons in the game (so the Metallic deck would have 1 with a Survey icon and 1 with a Warfare icon). In the Exotic deck it would have 1 Exotic icon (and there might be 2 of them).

I might also like to add a Level 2 tech of each of the original types. not sure if it should be a permanent tech (and therefore double sided), or if it should relate to the Exotic stuff (like having an Exotic icon). Maybe 2 per stack, each with one Exotic icon and one native icon. I guess I get to think up another 3 or 6 Tech abilities :)

 Any suggestions for tech abilities are welcome - leave a comment with your ideas!

2 comments:

Seth Jaffee said...

I think the Level 2 Adv, Met, Fert techs with 1 "native" icon and 1 Exo icon could be this:

Another Improved X card, with "You may play an additional card." appended on it.

Thoughts?

Broccoli said...

I haven't actually played the game yet (I kept missing it at BGGCon), but most of what you said in this post sounds interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to having the print'n'play back up and testing out the new exotic expansion.

Bryan Graham
(Broccoli on BGG)