I posted this about a week ago but saw no responses. Maybe nobody was interested, maybe propagation is slow, or maybe it didn't get out of the country. Anyway, I'll try it again. The post contains five variations that can be made to the Shadowfist rules to make somewhat different games: a) circular sites - all the better to defend with. b) splitting decks - make multiple stacks (based on card type) of your deck. Decide from which stacks you want to draw. c) "spies" - limited knowledge of the cards opponents are drawing. d) burning for power - change the amount you get for burning. e) faction shopping - a single large deck that is shared by all players. The deck is split into separate stacks for the different factions. Players draw from whichever stack(s) they want. Anyway, on with the original post. -----------8<---snip---snip---------------------------------------- Living in Japan I don't have access to many opponents for Shadowfist. As such I spend more time thinking about playing than actually playing. A side effect of this is that I've come up with a few simple variants. As I don't have opponents I don't have anyone to try these out with. If you do try them please let me know what you think. 1. Circular Sites ----------------- The left and right edge of your site structure are connected. The primary effect of this is to make defending easier when you have a number of locations (columns of sites). You still play new sites on the edge (or into the 2nd row) but now the left or the right edge are the same. Additional variant: You can play new sites between existing sites. Why? I'm not sure but I figure someone can come up with a reason :-) 2. Split Decks -------------- Players can split their decks in *n* (typically 2) stacks before shuffling as well as deciding which cards go in which stack. When a player draws they can decide how many of each stack they draw (e.g., a players has two stacks and has to draw 4 cards. (s)he can draw 1 card from stack A and 3 from stack B, 2 from each etc. etc.). A simple example would be for all players to split their deck into 2 stacks: a sites stack and the rest (characters, edges, states etc.). Players then could ensure (via their choice of drawing) that they don't have a glut or famine of sites. A game such as the above would be quite different to the normal Shadowfist. You'd need less sites as you don't really have to worry about them randomly turning up. It'd also probably tend to be faster and "deadlier" as players can more precisely control their own availability of power. There's a number of subvariants here. Don't just have a sites and a "the rest" stack, but have a sites, a characters, an edges, a states, etc. etc. stack (sounds gross). Alternatively order your stacks so that you must use all the cards in the previous stack before using the next. This allows players to order their cards into one thats are useful early in the game (e.g., resource producers and cheap cards) for the first stack(s) and ones that are useful later in the game (e.g., big characters and other expensive cards) for later stack(s). There's sub-sub-variants (too much latex? :-) here about how many cards have to be in each stack or whether its unfixed or... As you can imagine there's lots of possibilities with the basic idea of multiple stacks per player. 3. Insider Information ---------------------- Everytime a player draws one or more cards they must show the first one drawn to their opponent(s). Idea is that players have a limited spy resource or network in other players' power structure and thus they can capture a limited picture of their future plans. A side effect of this variant is that players would probably prefer to draw a number of cards at once rather than one or two each turn (in which case the opponent(s) virtually know everything). It could be added that players do not have to draw back to their hand size (e.g., at 5 cards, if draw one everyone gets to see, if wait then maybe at 4 or 3 and opponent only gets to see one card). This could be made more interesting in multi-player by each player only have one (or a limited number) of spies. They choose at the start which player(s) they'll spy on. Only those players who have declared a spy in player X's camp get to see the first card that player X draws. 4. Burning for Power -------------------- A number of people have said that burning for 5 power is too powerful in a two player game. Just change the value. For example maybe the value of 3 is better for play balance? Maybe the current turn number with a maximum of 5 (e.g., 4'th turn burn would get you 4 power, 1'st turn burn [how] would get you 1). Disadvantage of this is you have to keep count of the turns. Maybe the number of sites they have, maybe...there's lots of options. 5. Faction Shopping ------------------- This is a combination of the previous multiple stack idea and the single common deck approach (all players use a single common deck, rather than their own). It probably works best multi-player. Take your single huge deck (you have been collecting a number of cards right? :-) and split them into separate stacks for each of the major factions, one for sites, and one for unaligned states etc. (optionally separate stacks for each of chi, magic and technology states/edges) as well as one for small factions and unaligned characters. Place all these stacks in the centre of the table (or other convenient place) with a clear label besides each. When players draw they decide how many and from which stack(s) they want to take. Thus players can effectively pick and choose the faction(s) they want to play as well as better controlling power supply (sites-same as option 3 above). There's also a level of meta-gaming here in the choice of stacks (faction) to draw from. Certain factions are opposed more strongly to others (i.e., have cards that can hose the opposed faction) and thus other player choice may have an influence on the "best" stack to draw from (e.g., "she's drawing Guiding Hand which are anti-tech., maybe I should go with Ascended instead of the Architects"). Similarly being one of several players drawing from the same faction may be a bad thing (no guarantee of getting enough basic resources nor of not running out of the faction in the mid or end-game) and thus this encourages diversity (not everyone will go for the one "killer" faction and indeed maybe those who do pick it will be persecuted). Basically this changes Shadowfist to more of a boardgame type feel and is ideal (I think/hope) for the situation where one person has all the cards (i.e., not everyone has to own the game, the game changes each time as you can play the same people but use quite different cards etc.). This is how I'll introduce and play Shadowfist when I return to Australia/my-play-group. I welcome comments and responses to this. Spike Bun Bu RyoDo ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Michael Barlow spike@speech-sun15.ntt.jp Human Interface Labs. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Tokyo, Japan. ------