I've been thinking about how you could add the enlightenment win condition to the standard game..

Heres my idea! What do you think?

Every round each player can declare a military and a political conflict each, for a total of 4 conflicts per round. This means that there are 4 rings that can be claimed in a single round.

ENLIGHTENMENT RULE

If a player claims all of the 4 rings in a single round from all 4 conflicts, then they have the option of declaring a bonus fifth conflict (military or political, their choice).

If they win this conflict and claim the 5th ring, then they win the game through enlightenment, by claiming all 5 rings in a single round!

Only players that claim rings through the 4 conflicts can declare the bonus enlightenment conflict.

Rings claimed by card effects don't count. This stops any clan having an advantage through card effects.

1 hour ago, Maffster said:

ENLIGHTENMENT RULE

If a player claims all of the 4 rings in a single round from all 4 conflicts, then they have the option of declaring a bonus fifth conflict (military or political, their choice).

If they win this conflict and claim the 5th ring, then they win the game through enlightenment, by claiming all 5 rings in a single round!

No.

No, without a cherry on top.

Reason? This rule just further elevated the new Uni and Lion SH decks to a tier of nigh untouchable. (I can give examples, possibly with my Phoenix deck as well, but I hope this is sufficient enough)

Let honor be a viable win condition before setting new mechanics to win

The biggest issue with this is that it's a win condition that is actually impossible without your opponent's help. All the other win conditions, even honor/dishonor, can be won by simply playing well against an opponent who is also playing well (although not necessarily competitively) while this actually requires your opponent to make a huge blunder and basically hand you the game.

That is a creative idea Maffster, but I would add that since you already have a Ring, your current role, you would simply need to capture all 4 other rings in one turn. Additionally, I like that it makes your opponent a passive participant, and adds another level of Ring Strategy to the game. As far as honor victories, that could be as simple as gaining honor for each ring you returned at the end of the turn. If you win 2 rings, you in two honor at the end of the turn. That would likely address GoblinGuide's great point as well forcing engagement and tempo.

Unfortunately that mucks with the current Ring of Air mechanic but it is an interesting idea.

With regards to Lord Blunt great point, which I haven't even considered, nor have I considered how the Phoenix Clans new Monk (the one that steals an opponents Ring at the end of a successful battle).

Nonetheless, it sounds like a fun and interesting twist that I might float to our local playgroup as an optional rule and see how it changes things.

The problem here is that it has to be done during a single turn.

The way to achieve this that occurs to me immediately is a Role card.

And the way the role card would work is that each time you claim a ring you haven't claimed yet during the game, you get to place a token on that card. And once you have placed 5 tokens (claimed each ring at least once) then you can win the game without claiming their stronghold.

I think that could make things very interesting.

You see, without accounting for other card effects, they can only really lose 1 contest to you of a ring that you haven't claimed. After that, they really need to be confident that they can win the contest before declaring an attack against you of any other ring-- despite the fact that those are going to be the rings with fate on them because they haven't been claimed yet (well, at least not by you.)

If they do that, then you would need to declare 4 attacks against them and win those contests to claim the remainder of the rings-- and if you have beaten them 4 times, then you have already either broken all their provinces or taken out their stronghold-- i.e. you already won the game.

But then there are already some cards in the game that allow you to change what element a contest is for. These would basically be an absolute necessity for this deck-- although each of those cards being included is a card that isn't being used to actually win the contest.

4 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

The way to achieve this that occurs to me immediately is a Role card.

And   the way the role card would work is that each time you claim a ring you haven't claimed yet during the game, you get to place a token on that card. And once  you have placed 5 tokens (claimed each ring at least once) then you can win the game without claiming their province.

I like that a lot.

Also maybe make it so that if you have a token on your role card for the fire ring and your oppent wins the next fire ring they get the token on their role card.

So only 5 tokens in play one for each ring and to win by enlightenment you need them all on your role card

Updated idea here.

I would have added it to this comment but I got a little carried away