Deities & Demigods - the return of Hera

A few different times in the past, Hera has played a role in Deities & Demigods -- usually, in one way or another, controlling which deity cards get added to the Olympus deck. Each time thus far, she's been cut.

In my last post I described a potential issue that I've been worried about, which is that a player concentrating on Zeus when nobody else does can basically choose all the cards that go into the deck. I will reiterate that I don't think it's necessarily too powerful to be able to do so, but that frankly, it's not fun. Not for the other 1-3 players in the game anyway.

In that last test (UKGE with Andy, Matt, and Ian), I tried a rule to combat that dynamic, which was simply that you cannot be Start player twice in a row. In that game, the dynamic I'm worried about didn't actually come up and neither did that new restriction -- not really, though it's possible players made some decisions based on it (like, I believe Matt would have played differently when he was start player if he were allowed to get it again). To tell you the truth, it's not "being start player twice in a row" that I'm really trying to avoid... it's dominating the Olympus deck that I'm worried about. My "simple" fix of disallowing start player 2 rounds in a row didn't seem like the best idea after all. For example, consider a 2 player game - that would remove any sort of ability to "go for" start player!

I want to keep in mind that it's very possible there's no problem to begin with, and that concentrating on Zeus allows you to control the rest of the game... and maybe that's just fine. Matthew said he'd run some tests with the rules as they were, and maybe force that dynamic to come into play and see if he thought it was a problem (he said he hadn't seen it come up, or didn't notice any issues with it so far).

Out of the aftermath of all the discussion, I have updated my prototype to try what I figure is probably the best solution that came up: re-introducing Hera cards into the mix. This time, Hera will have a handful of cards (could be tiles, or 1/2 size cards, or whatever), of which 5 will be placed face up at the beginning of the game, 1 per cycle. These cards will indicate a condition, and at the end of the cycle, that condition is checked, and the player who best fulfills the condition becomes start player (and gets to add a deity card to the deck). Ties would be resolved by the initiative track, so sometimes (and especially in the first cycle) I suspect the dynamic will be the same as the current game. But the point is, instead of just bumping up your minimum devotion to Zeus and adding a 2nd Zeus to the deck for likely uncontested access to start player, you'll have to do different things each cycle.

In my first attempt at these Hera cards, there are 2 cards that kind of lean toward concentrating on each of the deities, but only 1 for Zeus, since he also controls the tiebreaks. Here's what I tried for the first draft:
* The player with the most A/B/M cards in play becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the most building markers in a single city becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the most troops in play (not on quests) becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player who controls the most cities (including ties) becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the most gold becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the most total devotion becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the highest quest bonus becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player with the most completed quests becomes the start player. Initiative track breaks ties.
* The player farthest along the initiative track becomes the start player.

A few of these are unlikely (or impossible) to have any real effect in the first cycle, which just means the initiative track will control in that case, just like it does now. But I think all of them could come into play starting with the 2nd cycle, and some during the first as well.

I definitely don't love adding another stack of cards to the game, and I also dislike adding more process to the end of the cycle. As I type this, I have a feeling that "concentrating on Zeus so that you can control the direction of the game" is probably a valid strategy that should exist. But I'll give this a try at least once or twice and see how it goes.

If I don't like how this goes, I think I will revert to the last version saved, and maybe just make the initiative track a little less lucrative, so if you're climbing that track, it's because you want to control the direction of the game, rather than you incidentally controlling the game while climbing the initiative track for other reasons.