by juffowup
While I'm waiting to get my new copy of this to the table, I've been thinking about the best way to teach this game. I don't like the basic/advanced options the rulebook suggests, since a player's first "real" game won't come until after they've seen the age 3 cards and know what's coming. I've been thinking about the following version of the rules:Start the event deck with all age A events, resolving one event per round for the first several rounds. Players don't draw military cards until the age A deck has gotten down to the 'normal' size, at which point each player gets a starter hand of 3 military cards and the event deck works normally. So we get several turns of the basic game, before the event deck kicks in.
Remove all unit technologies and tactics from all the decks, and push them back one age each. All military stuff gets postponed, and we can wait till age 2 to explain most of those rules. Players can build extra warriors to try to have the upper hand for the Age 1 events, but that's it for Age 1. This will leave the Age 1 deck a little small, I might add in the extra cards for 3 or 4 players to make up for this. This will also make the game a little more forgiving generally I think.
The result of these rules is hopefully a few turns that play like the basic game, followed by the rest of Age 1 playing like the advanced game, and then the full game kicking in in Age 2.
I guess I would leave all other cards as is, even though many of them won't make much sense... I'd just let players know that military is generally weaker in this first game than it will be in the full game, and that many leaders are less useful than they might seem.
Thoughts?