Suggestions to offset randomness / start advantage

Northwold · July 2023

Given the number of different discussions on how randomness can throw the game in one player's favour, even before anyone's played a card, I had a few suggestions:

1. Introduce a virtual coin toss for who gets to start, with players picking heads or tails to pick the starting player. Keeps going until one loses.

2. On first draw both players get five gold cards, nothing else. Remove the coin advantage for the second player (which only has any logic to it with particular combinations of low value cards and, more commonly, can hand the second player a too-strong card that the first never had any prospect of getting).

3. On first draw the tavern must offer four four-value cards, one from each deck.

4. Each player gets to veto one deck from the deck choices. Eg so people who find crow games unbearable can avoid them.

5. Remove the deserter penalty so that games that are snowballing out of control but with a player who insists on making a cup of tea between every mouse click can be terminated.

6. (A great suggestion from someone in one of the other threads.) Introduce an agent card that counters the card pulling decks (crow, almalexia), eg if you pull two extra cards during a round, for every subsequent pull the other player gains X prestige.

It's not perfect, but it would make things a little less random from before you've even started playing and offer a little bit better balance for the worst snowballing decks.

katanagirl1 · July 2023

If you remove the extra gold from the second player, they are at a disadvantage if player 1 was able to obtain a good card costing 2-4 gold from the tavern, since they were able to go first.

I also believe there is an unfair advantage of being able to both go second on patron pick and go second in getting cards from the tavern. If one player gets first pick of patrons then they should go second to draw cards, and vice versa.

Necrotech_Master · August 2023

the game is already basically doing an invisible coin toss to determine which player gets to play first, making the player choose a head or tail and doing an actual visible coin flip wont change anything

removing the 1 coin from the 2nd player would actually make them significantly more disadvantaged, the first one to play already has the major advantage of first tavern pick, so the advantage of going 2nd is you could potentially afford something up to 6 cost, different strategies

the only thing i would really agree with is to not penalize you for conceding, its already penalizing you conceding by not giving you any rewards (you get the defeat box only if you play the match through), and with the queues themselves being placed against random people, i dont know how you would "game the ranking system" unless it matches you against the same person multiple times in a row