#6 Open hand cards and other house rules
We (group of about 30 here in the Silly Valley) play
with some simple house rules:
1) Resource cards are exposed. You can see what
eveyone has, all the time. This removes the advantage
from card counters (which we find a significant
advantage) while making the mystery of theifing less
interesting.
2) Longest road is the shortest continuous path
between the two selected locations. This means that a
hex which is entirely circled with a road leading off
it, then usually only counts for three plus the length
of the dangling road.
3) Players can make trades in attempt to control
where the theif is placed, "I'll give you a brick and a
wheat if you put the theif <there>." "I'll give you
two sheep if you don't put the thief <here>.
4) Most players with ports in the early and mid game
run open ports on their turns. Simply this means that
any other player can use their port for a tax of a
single resource card.
It would be great to have support for these. The first
in particular makes for a much more interesting game.
The last two don't explicitly require code changes, but
some direct support for the features would help a lot.
J C Lawrence
claw@kanga.nu
1 is a great idea to make game play faster as well. Counting tends to slow games down.
@JCL: Prolly a good idea to make each of these a separate request as they are largely unrelated development-wise.
Pardon the large text above. Used a hash before the number, not realising it would be interpreted as a formatting character. Better use Preview I guess.