Depending on the extent of the redesign, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Five Rings themselves as the victory condition(s). Something like trying to control X Rings before the opponent, or place X tokens on Rings. Different clans would have different rings that they are good at. This should help balance both the "downhill" effect of military and the stalemate aspect of honor v dishonor.

Having one "turn" where both players move through the phases together should help address the going first advantage.

One rule change I think is almost certain is that Unique will act more like Singular, where you can have a full amount in your deck but only one in play.

I could see some fun ways they could adopt that. Each ring traditionally has a correlation to some aspect of the game, though it's changed a fair amount over the history.

I could see Fire being dueling.

Air being political.

Earth being defense.

Water being offense.

and Void being either magic or something to do with card usage/draw.

Of course there are other ways to slot them, but they could hit all the bases of the clan strengths and weaknesses.

One thing that bugged me about the honor-dishonor matchup was the direction Brian Reese took it.

He made it so that dishonor would be tied to the personal honor of the guys targeted, so that it compensated for proclaiming high honor personalities.

The idea was that in a honor-dishonor matchup, dishonor would be the one to win, while honor was supposed to attack.

Honor decks never had the cards that would allow them to attack, so the entire idea typically didn't work as planned. It also had an interesting side effect:

The result was that, given a choice, you tried to have a very low honor personality base. Because personal honor became - for every deck except the honor deck - a liability instead of a benefit. To me, that was very off-putting. That is a design choice I would not like to see again, given the tagline "Honor is stronger than steel".

This is the point where design and world-building collide.

I understand that this tug-of-war had to be resolved in some way, but I can only speculate why the choice was "dishonor wins" instead of "honor wins". (I have a theory.) That, to many of you, may seem like a matter of taste, but the entire setting had at that point been infested by a plethora of factions that in one way or another rebelled against honor and decency and derived their coolness and popularity from that attitude, or at least tried to do so. I think the integrity of the setting suffered, as there was no argument why honor was important to anybody. And with an Onyx emperor, that would have been even harder to explain.

Things I would like kept as these thing to me is the what makes L5R

• 3 victory conditions: Military, Honor / Dishonor and Enlightenment.
• The 5 Rings.
• 2 Decks
• All else can be tweaked to more efficient.

I would like to see the two decks maintained along with the 4 provinces, the multiple victory conditions, and the 5 rings.

As a slightly off to the side idea, I always thought that the concept of honour would have worked better as a resource than a win condition. The more honourable your clan and personalities used or the way you played, the more support you could potentially receive to win the game. This would allow for all the win conditions to require the concept of honour to win the game, which fits within the setting. Dishonour would effectively be a resource denial of honour, which while some players don’t like, is found in some form within every card game.

The win conditions could then be: military, political and enlightenment.

I really hoping to see 9 great clans with 2 decks 4 Provences and a stronghold as that has been the look for me.

I think we can afford to lose two decks and 4 Provinces. Its easier to manage one deck of cards (sleeving and transportation) and the 4 Province model was unsatisfying because the enevitable death spiral after losing your first province.

Things I'd like to keep:

Multiple win conditions

Clan Identity

Story/Card related Prizes

Strongholds

Things I'd like to go:

DTP sets (FL anyone?)

2 Deck format -(Flame On) this might have been the real reason the game was not sustainable as either a ccg or an lcg extra effort in production (printing, collation and distribution)

Holdings: the main reason the game was soooo goddamn hard to balance

Ideas to thow around:

Rings as a victory condition but not as cards - much like MP or VP something that's in the rulebook instead of cardboard

Seige might have been on to something: but 1 deck 4 districts/provinces

... lose two decks and 4 Provinces.

Oh boy I am tired... It really took me a while to figure out that you meant to wrap up the two decks in one and don't get rid of the whole game...

I am all in fro card reduction 80 cards are to much... 60 or perhaps even 50 would be preferable imo.

However the dual set up is very iconic. It just feels different then pulling out a Magic deck for example.

But I agree this does not need to be there... But I think it is a nice to have.

Oh my god, please get rid of Holdings (or at least the gold scheme). That is all.

less inflammatory this time:

I am ready for an L5R format without a gold scheme to support it for resources. Free gold may have been the calling card of my clan, but that doesn't mean that it was EVER good for the game.

Just get rid of the "death spiral" and people wouldn't complain about the provinces. Well, they'd probably still complain.

I'd prefer a modified province system similar to shields from Duel Masters. You keep the province mechanic, but not only do you avoid resource spiral, you actually Gain resource options when they are destroyed to keep you in the game.

I'd prefer a modified province system similar to shields from Duel Masters. You keep the province mechanic, but not only do you avoid resource spiral, you actually Gain resource options when they are destroyed to keep you in the game.

Can you explain a bit more? I don't know the game.

I generally do love mechanics that offset the disadvantage of playing from behind in the interest of keeping the game competitive.

Beginning of the game you took the top 6 cards of your deck and laid them out like provinces then played off the deck like most card games. When the shield(province) was destroyed by an attack, you put the card that was in the shield into your hand, or sometimes directly cast it for free via special keyword. It'd be similar to an imbue chi/fires in the hidden city type effect from L5R combined with not buying out of your provinces.

Beginning of the game you took the top 6 cards of your deck and laid them out like provinces then played off the deck like most card games. When the shield(province) was destroyed by an attack, you put the card that was in the shield into your hand, or sometimes directly cast it for free via special keyword. It'd be similar to an imbue chi/fires in the hidden city type effect from L5R combined with not buying out of your provinces.

Interesting. I like it.

I'm not sure if getting the card for free when a province is destroyed is necessarily the right way to go for L5R, but I do really like the theme of a character coming up out of a razed province to seek revenge.

Like I said, it'd have to be modified ( to fit l5r mechanics, and avoid copyright?) but the premise behind seems solid in that it avoid the blitz/fast cav issues, and stops snowball resource choke.

Like I said, it'd have to be modified ( to fit l5r mechanics, and avoid copyright?) but the premise behind seems solid in that it avoid the blitz/fast cav issues, and stops snowball resource choke.

I think the bigger issue for L5R is that the reduction in dynasty "hand size" is such a big deal that I'm not sure if it's enough, but that depends on what you want to achieve, exactly.

It's not really a copyright issue, though.

Would starting with the game, say 5ish gold, worth of personalities help stem the potential tide of blitzes? I don't know if I would want the overall idea to be removed from the game but the effect could be lessened.

It's not about getting rid of blitz. Blitz has a useful spot to counter slow burn control. I'm merely suggesting that disconnecting province from dynasty purchasing removes the "must flip only peeps out of my last province every turn forever or lose" scenarios, or snipe a province/2 then just sit back and do nothing but outproduce all game a la lion/battle maiden switch.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that some sort of "built in" dueling mechanic might benefit the game. Some way to allow personalities to issue duels without card effects. Perhaps a dueling phase in battle, where each player (or perhaps only the defender?) can initiate one duel, but the result is only to send the loser home bowed. Whatever it may be, I think it would be neat to make dueling something that every deck must at least consider, rather than simply ignoring in the hope of not meeting a dueling deck, or being prepared to write off duel losses. Of course, the flip side of this would be that it would be very difficult to build a dominant dueling deck. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing, though.

This. All of this. One of the things I like about the Star Wars LCG, all other things aside, is the fact that "dueling" happens every turn. I'd be surprised if they didn't make a change similar to what you suggest. Just...please, FFG, no Twist of Fate. Just no.

Just thinking...

Once we put all cards into one deck, get rid of cavalry, naval, provinces, enlightment, certain build types that might seem kinda extreme (like blitz), put all honor/dishonor manipulation into "political victory" box or even drop 4 victory conditions entirely and substitute them with collecting some "ponts of victory", then what will be left of the L5R? Even if it's not an already mentioned "A Game of 5 Rings" then there's a risk of facing a situation when most of decks and matchups look pretty much the same. We may get a product that is solid, technically efficient but lacks spirit and creativity. There may not be matchups worthy of remembrance anymore.

Personal Opinion: The loss of Dynasty production for province loss is less about loss of production and more about the increased reliance upon random elements. You can bake in a cost to mulligan provinces to fix that, but a reduction in chance is a reduction in chance - extreme Dynasty card access increases access to Uniques. Losing a game because you were at two provinces and flipped two holdings is a tiring thing, but so is losing to an opponent who has two provinces and flips a pair of beatsticks every turn.

My holdouts:

- Two Decks

- Strongholds

- Bowing

- Minimum of 2 victory conditions

Just about everything else probably has a way to be improved upon, somewhere.

Hmm me would like honor loss/gain to change especially when looking at it retrospectively. It makes for head-ache inducing games. Makes head hurt just thinking about how it made head hurt.

What if Honor and Dishonor were tracked on two separate axes, akin to Mass Effect 's Paragon/Renegade system? Not sure if there's a way to handwave that as being thematic, but it's a possible way of eliminating the stalemate situation.

Personal Opinion:

Fate/Dynasty deck need to stay.

Military/Enlightenment victory conditions need to stay.

That's... actually pretty much it.

As far as Honor/Dishonor goes, AEG actually already tackled this in one way with the Siege set. Have anytime you gain honor, or cause another player to have an honor loss, gain a political token. Reach a certain amount of Political Tokens, win the game.

Now how honor interacts with the rest of the game is the tricky part, because while that solves the issue of the "tug of war" you still have to carefully balance things like honor requirements, and the effects of dishonoring and such.

There's tons of other things I think should stick around, and Im of the opinion "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" regarding things like Duels, Focus Values, etc. But it's been a few years since I last played, and the power on dueling always seemed to vary from arc to arc. If dueling changed, that'd be fine, but it's something I think should stay, thematically.

My only hold-outs are:
-Factions (Not specific ones, but that the concept exists.)

-A variety of Some-Manner of Starts-In-Play Card that modifies deck-building/game state/card-value [sensei, Stronghold, Wind, what have you] to choose from.

-Maintaining the core outline of the Combat Step. Having multiple places to fight, the ability to move between fights, and the back-and-forth of playing actions. Needing to understand the tempo-game; when it's okay to sacrifice provinces, when you need to fight, when you can go all-in, when you have to hedge, and when you need to split your forces. There's plenty of specific parts of battle you can gut (such as provinces being tied to resource production, so long as you keep seperate battlefields) and I won't care, but those ideas are pretty much the best-designed, most stand-out aspect of the game, for me.

The complexity of L5R's battle system when the environment's card-base supports it is what sets it apart, as a game. Battle is to L5R as the Combat Grid is to Highlander, a somewhat clunky jumble of mechanics that makes the game really feel different than the rest of what's on offer. Although something likely needs to be done about its All-or-Nothing nature in order to make the game more accessible to casual or new players. AEG tried to amend it with Yu, but that failed horribly.

-Oh, and Chi-Death. Tons of Re-Occurring Chi-Death. Maybe gouge a slight bowl into the base of the Chi-Death cards, where you can gather salty tears from your opponents. Sezaru's Blessing Didn't Do Anything Wrong.