I have been considering using a 2nd set to extend the game up to 7 players.

Most of the problems are solvable. By painting figure bases, Adding counters to distinquish fortifications. And a rule to resolve influence ties, when both players have the same initial influence.

The main problem appears to map setup. with 5 players. placing 10 terrain tiles is unlikly to produce a legal map. i.e. The home locations won't be the required 4 areas apart. Any suggestions about how to solve this ? Note: This effect gets worse with each additional player. The number of hexes needed to seperate the home locations, increases as a square-function of the number of players.

My initial thoughts are;

1) Increase number of map tiles to 3 per player. While the map would be legal the game length for a 6 player game would increase to about 10 hours :eek:

2) Allow all home areas to be 3 hexes apart. That keeps the game short at the cost of radically altering player interaction.

3) Alter the tile placement rules to force the creation of empty space within the map.

3a) When placing tiles. assume a central "inland-sea" {7-hexes for 5 players, 19 for 6, 37 for 7} Tiles must initially be placed to complete a circle around that.

3b) When placing tiles, add to the rules, each tile must be placed so that it is adjascent to exsiting tiles by the minimum possible number of areas. The rule requiring at least 2 adjascent areas still applies. This should encourage creating a "tree-root" type map arangement with lots of internal empty space.

XAos said:

I like both of these ideas. They seem like the easiest to implement.

That said, I don't intend on playing more than 4 myself until an expansion comes out, which will hopefully have some suggestions on that point itself. =P

Although, the idea of an internal sea would be a nifty solution to merging water and land hexes, for those of us pining for waterfaring units in an expansion... Very interesting...

ild just change the requirement to 3 hexes... with normal version, there is not enough conflict before someone can get 6 runes. I personally only play the epic variant for that reason. The closer placement of kingdoms will mean more fun killing. You should consider, though, that with more people there will be more runes (with all the influence bids and quests... etc. So getting runes will be a lot easier.

Ild say just play it with 3 hexes between starting zones. (the easiest option), and see what happens. If it sucks, then try one of the other options.