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I brushed off that rule about resetting turn order every round for 2 years
My group always argued over who went first in our weekly game of Terraforming Mars. I thought it was just nitpicking and we kept the same turn order for months. Then I played at a convention in Portland where a volunteer showed me how a simple random draw each round changed the entire strategy. I tried it with my group after that and now nobody feels stuck in a losing position. Has anyone else seen a small house rule fix bigger problems in their games?
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morgan.logan1mo ago
Respectfully I see it different. Keeping the same order builds long term rivalries and makes you plan several moves ahead instead of just grabbing the best option each round. My group never liked random draws because it felt too chaotic and took away from the story we were building together.
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willow1141mo ago
Flip the whole thing on its head. Try keeping the same turn order but letting the last player pick the first player for the next round. That way the guy who got stuck cleaning up scraps gets to put his rival in the hot seat right after. It builds that long term tension morgan.logan talks about but also forces everyone to think about how their actions affect the person who gets to pick next. My group did this for a year and it turned into a whole mind game of who's gonna screw who over next round. It's not random but it's not stale either.
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caleb2621mo ago
That's wild to me that you kept the same order for months, @morgan.logan. I get the rivalry angle, but we had one guy who always went last and he basically quit because he felt like he was just cleaning up scraps every round. When we switched to the random draw, it shook everything up so much that the guy who used to go first got dead last in the next three games and had to completely rethink his whole approach to starting a round.
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terry_jones1mo ago
Did that guy who used to go first actually figure out how to play from last place after those three games, or did he just get salty and start pushing for another system change?
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