by lindyhopper
One of the flaws of Mage Knight for me is how slow it goes with anything more than 2 players. It's great solo and works well two players, but beyond that the downtime gets rather extreme.One option to speed the game up is to add a little splash of randomness, as the purely deterministic nature of the combat resolution tends to bring on optimization-A.P., and a few random elements to resolution makes it much harder to plan the 'perfect' move. But this solution doesn't really fit the game Vlaada has designed, so I am steering clear of that for now.
The primary idea I have in mind to speed up a 4-player game of MK would be to do the following:
- Roll the magic offer at the beginning of the round
- Draft the turn order cards
- The player with the lowest turn order card may reserve a mana die (no other players can use it)
- All players simultaneously plan their turn
- Players can use any of the remaining mana in the offer, all used dice are rerolled at the end of the round
- Once all turns are planned, players move their tokens to the final hex they will move to
- They then resolve all combats that are instigated. Everyone fights their own copies of any NPC monsters they engage (I don't think this method would work well for pvp games, so not even addressing it).
- If multiple players conquer the same location, only the player who is earlier in the turn order places their claim token on the space. But all other rewards can be claimed per player.
- The player who is lower in the turn order also may draft rewards first, with cards not replaced in the offer until the end of the round
- In the case where an action is destructive (like burning a monastery) any non-burning actions taken by other players on the space are resolved first
I hope to try out a game with some version of these outlined variations soon to see if we can condense the 4-player game a bit. But I wanted to discuss the ideas with other MK fans on BGG to see if there were any improvements that could be made to them before we give it a go.
I think these changes would definitely alter some of the underlying feel of the game. Certainly there's less competition for mana dice and being first to a choice space on the board. The turn order role-selection is still an important choice in terms of drafting rewards. Draftable units, spells, and advanced actions would all be first-come-first-serve in turn order, so if there was a particular item you were keen to draft, you'd need to take the lower turn order card to secure it. Getting in first also gets your token on the space, for when that matters.
I think there's some things that would break using this sort of variant, notably pvp, and probably scoring VPs due to claim tokens. Since my group isn't so fussed about the VP, and is generally more concerned with having fun, this isn't a big deal to me personally.
Anyway, I'm curious what others have to say on the topic. It seems to me that if anything can be done to improve the speed of MK (other than just "think faster!") it's to make the turns simultaneously planned. So this is my first swing at the adjustments needed...
Cheers,