Deities and Demigods - update

Had a nice 4p test tonight with Matthew, Andy, and Ian. I implemented some of the tweaks from yesterday's post - start player must change hands, and monuments can either bump devotion or earn the favor if the deity

I liked the monument change, and the more I think about it, the more I would rather have the either/or monuments than add more monuments, especially if the monuments wouldn't be the same effect (though that's not really important, I mean the buildings don't all have the same effects). So I think I'll keep trying that out, and it will probably be a keeper.

The start player rule didn't really come into play. It almost did, and would have been disappointing for Matthew (though to some extent that might be because he's used to being able to keep start player, if that were never the rule then it might not be as bothersome for a player). Discussion after the game made it clear that solution was not popular amongst these players. Several other options were presented and discussed, some reasonable options, some (in my opinion) either too fiddly, too complicated, or don't actually address the problem I'm referring to.

One thing that might be wrong with that proposed fix is that it might not scale well for player count. In particular, in a 2p game it would mean the start player will alternate, and you cannot fight for it. Is that bad? It sounds kinda bad.

One possibility is that maybe I'm too sensitive to a potential problem that really isn't that bad. Matthew said he hadn't noticed it being a problem in his games, but I swear it seems to come up in a like 20% of mine... Or else I've inflated that in my mind because I'm so sensitive to it. I've asked Matthew to play some and watch for that dynamic, maybe play to force it, and see if he finds what I'm worried about. I intend to do the same.

Of the other fix ideas, maybe the .later promising is to decouple the start player from the Zeus track and use some other measure to determine start player. I inherently don't love this idea, because not only does it add rules, bit do.ponents and dynamics for something that currently works well most of the time. However, it might be necessary to fix that one issue.

But what to attach start player to? Well, maybe Hera should be called off the bench again... There could be a small Hera deck, or set of Hera cards, that would indicate the aspect of the game that will be measured each round in order to see who gets start player. This is somewhat similar to the last incarnation of Hera cards, which gave bonuses based on some conditions. In this case the bonus would be start player.

 But what to measure? Well, I used to want city control to matter more during the game. Should number if cities controlled, or maybe current city scoring (5/2/1 for most/tied/min1 troops), be the factor that earns you start player? Or does that just make Ares stronger instead of Zeus? And what happens in case of a tie? I'd rather have an unambiguous measure.

It could be an auction of some kind, blind bid (boo!), round-and-round, or once around perhaps. This would give something else to do with gold, which might be welcome... But it adds a whole mechanism to the game which I'm not too fond of doing, plus added game length. And it might sort of just transfer the problem from players who concentrate on Zeus to players who concentrate on Hermes.

I kinda hope I'm just wrong that there's a problem to worry about, because leaving things the way they are seems easiest!