On 7/8/2019 at 11:54 PM, AllWingsStandyingBy said:
While more board sections and an increased player number are probably inevitable in future expansions, given FFG's track record, I actually think both would likely be diminishing returns that add stuff for the sake of adding stuff without improving game play.
There's nothing from stopping groups from running 4-8 player games, as long as they own two copies of Outer Rim for the four extra player dashboards and starting ships. You could even double all the market decks except for the Bounty Deck and the Luxury Deck (e.g. two Vibroaxes, two Casino Heists, two YV-666s, etc. ...), and maybe even say that only one ship of each type can achieve the goal to become the unique version. The contact tokens would run out much quicker, which has positive and negative impacts on the game. Finding bounties would be much easier, but crew might become a real premium and would force people to hang out at Takodona to find crew. The big downside, though, is the game would take incredibly long, and downtime between turns would get unwieldy (can you imagine 7 players taking their turn after yours, 7 cycles and 7 purchases of the market deck, 7 patrol movements, ugh...). The game seems like it will always be best at 4 Players.
More board sections would either increase the size of the board (changing how close patrols start to the center of the board and altering how pick-up/delivery stuff is balanced) or have alternate locations to replace existing ones. A bigger board means even less opportunity for player and patrol interactions and may further benefit Han with his +2 Movement. New board sections can't simply replace old board sections in games because you'd have to somehow sift out every single planet reference in the market decks to those now-missing systems. Both seem like bad options, seemingly suggesting that the board is probably fixed as-is.
I could imagine a narrow board ring that simply goes above the current board but doesn't have any spaces players can move to, instead simply adding spaces to add new contacts (or new colors) to existing systems, thus effectively giving them 3-4 contacts. Making sure they add as new colors wouldn't dilute the existing color pools, which would make bounty hunting exceptionally hard.
Those are some good points on 4 being the maximum workable number.