Please do not post critiques or unrelated material (such as debates, rants, flames, or non-helpful posts). Only constructive feedback.

I will start by re posting my Draft tourney variant.

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Try playing with just Core Set to get people use to the style and mechanics. Use draft rules from Core Set.
Hopefully each player has their own copy of a core set. It helps to make this a requirement so that players can be randomly assigned Destruction or Order for the tourney. The most successful way my store encourages people to own a copy of the game for themselves is by offering free snacks and drinks and eliminating a door fee. The game pays for 40 bucks worth of snacks and drinks and better yet, after that, the food is free.
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I would have a few special weeks that allow the introduction of Assault on Ulthuan before it becomes habit. Introducing Assault of Ulthuan basically just allows them to swap a Core Set's starter deck of 40 cards with the 40 card starter deck for High Elves or Dark Elves (depending on the side the player is bound to). Then explain how ratio is a big part of draft, so to keep it equal, if a player swaps a starter deck then the deck they swapped out must take the 5 cards belonging to the removed faction from Assault on Ulthuan and replace them for the 5 High Elf or Dark Elf cards that were included with the Core Set.

You want to stress these swapping out rules are to insure that the ratio of cards stays the same. This will make everything clearer for the players.

Also, players are no longer limited to only using 10 neutral cards from the 24 that came with the Core Set. Instead that step is replaced with a ruling that allows them to use any 10 neutral cards from their collection (limited to 3 copies per card).
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Once the use of Assault as an option has become customary then hold special tourneys that allow the use of Battle Packs. The only thing new here is that once a player has gone through the above steps they are allowed to swap cards in the draft deck with cards from their collection AS LONG AS THEY MEET ALL RATIO REQUIREMENTS.

A few LEGAL Examples:

A player can swap up to 3 copies of one card in the draft deck with the same number of copies of a different card from collection. Such as 2 Dwarf Units for 2 other Dwarf Units. 2:2 of same card type and faction type.

A player can replace a dark elf hero card with another dark elf hero card. 1:1 Hero Unit Dark Elf.

NOTES:

A card being replaced must match same card type as a card replacing it. As seen above, a hero can only be replaced by another hero. Disregard these requirements for neutral cards as a players only limit when choosing the 10 neutral cards is the rule of 3.

Once a card has been added to the draft deck no more copies of that card can be added to it. This prevents a player from removing 2 copies of one card and a single copy of another in order to add 3 copies of a single card.

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Once all of the swapping is complete the players add the 3 treaties and 10 draft format cards from the Core Set to their draft deck and shuffle it. They will use this draft deck for the entire tourney. Players will draft using the draft rules from Core Set for each opponent, rather than keep same drafted deck for the rest of the tourney. In other words, a player will most likely have a different deck played against each opponent.

Opponents are paired randomly for first match and then follows a Swiss format between 3-5 rounds played for 50 mins. Tie breakers for matching opponents are broken based on the number of zones each player has burned total from all matches played so far. If still tied then the Win-Loss records of all previous opponents that played the tying players are used. If still tied then used the total number of zones burned by the previous opponents of tied players.

A Bye for uneven number of participants counts as a win with zero burned zones
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Brad's Multiplayer Variant

1. No one is ever eliminated, regardless of how many of their zones are burning.

2. Whoever takes an action that would result in the burning of an opponents zone (normally by dealing enough damage, but also by removing enough developments from a zone to it below the burn threshold) also receives a burn token to be used as a counter (not on one of their zones). Note: It is whoever actually burns the zone regardless of the amount of damage done. If Bob does 7 damage to Joe's Quest Zone and the next player is John who deals the final point of damage to burn the zone, then John gets the token and credit for the burn.

3. The first player to accumulate three burn tokens wins the game.

When a zone burns you place a burn token on it and it follows the normal rules. The player who burned the zone gets an additional burn token to keep for himself for score keeping.

One point I forgot to bring up was the initial round. The first player skips the Quest Phase and Battlefield Phase. The last player in the round gets to do everything (just like the two player rules) and everyone in between skips the Battlefield phase. Seems to work well.

Martin's Draft Variant

For now, the (largely untested) format I'm trying the game with is :

1. put one copy of each cards (except Warpstone Excavation and Contested Village) in a large cardpile
2. each player draw the top 15 cards as their "booster"
3. draft 10 times the drawn cards. The remaining 5 cards are set aside and considered not drafted.
4. repeat two times steps 2 and 3. Each player ends up with 30 cards, all differents, and different from their opponents.
5. each player choose a Capital board and build a legal deck using at most 3 copies of each of the 30 cards they drafted.

In the end, you should have a decent decks (that's why only 10 cards are drafted on among the 15 drawn).

I like the basic idea of drafting 1 card and having 3 copies of it for several reasons : 1) it allows you to rely on combos if you manage to find one, 2) you know your opponent won't have that card, so counter-drafting as a real meaning with cards like Troll Vomit or Dwarf Rangers, 3) it is fully compatible with the current packaging of BattlePacks and it is geared more toward LCG than CCG.

You may build several piles to draw your cards from instead of a big (and unstable) one. A pile for Core Set + Assaut of Ulthuan + March of the Damned, and another for the battlepacks of the 2 existing Cycles is a good ideas. Players could then drawn their first 2 boosters from the first pile, and the last booster from the second pile, for example.

I have also thought of coming up with lasting effects for when a certain zone is burning. I need help coming up with this one.

Simple example.

Battlefield burning = Discard a resource or card from hand to uncorrupt a single unit during the turn.
Kingdom burning = Gain one less resource.
Quest = Draw one less card.

Another variant I like and play as a house rule is having the option to play up to 3 resources worth of units to battlefield before game starts. If you playing ANY cards in this way, then you skip drawing cards for first turn.

Fang' has come up with a variant to test out. Corrupted units lose text on their cards.

Curator said:

I don't want to rain on Brad's parade here, but this is the exact scenario for MP that I pitched immediately after the game was sold early at GenCon (Which is when I was lucky enough to get my copy) - you can find the posts under Warhammer: Invasion both here and on the Boardgamegeek.com W:I forums, too. Sounds like Brad just used my MP suggestion here. It's not a big deal, but I would like to clarify that. It's really the best way to do MP, imho.

Curator said:

I like these - very COOL. Especially the penalties for burning zones. Do they create an imbalancing effect, though, making it too hard for a player to stage a comeback? Just curious.

Wytefang said:

I found another interesting idea for the community to work on.

MagoK thought of giving each Faction capital board a special.

"Capital of Empire: kingdom with just two power, but with the ability: Action: After a Suppot card enters in play, you 1 resource." or

"Capital of Dwarf: You can put two developments each your turn."

" Capital of High Elf: kingdon with five power, Quest with three Power, but zone with 5 Life Points (no 8 points)".

"Neutral Capital"...

I like this idea. Can we try to expand on it guys?

Yeah, I think we've all agreed that THAT would've been a cool optional variant for them to include with the official rulebook. A missed opportunity now, I guess.

i can add a draft-version we have been playing at the stahleck event recently:

WHI LCG Draft Rule:
- The players are sitting in a circle (if there are 8+ players, make 2 circles, …).
- Each player has to bring a fixed draft set of 10 cards:
o 2x Contested Village
o 2x Contested Stronghold
o 2x Armory
o 2x Forgotten Cemetery
o 2x Innovation
- Each player receives 2 different BPs (BPs 1-6 are recommended). Cost: 15 euro.
- Each player opens both packs, shuffles all the cards and forwards all of them to the player to his left. So each player has a draft pool of 40 cards.
- Now each player takes 10 card from the draft pool. This is the 1st draft pack.
- Each player chooses one out of these 10 to keep. The rest of 9 cards is forwarded to the player to the left.
- Now each player takes a second card from the remaining 9 cards, then forwards the rest of 8 to the player to the left. And so on, till all the first pack of 10 cards is exhausted.
- Now each player forwards the remaining draft pool of 30 cards to the player to the right.
- Each player takes a 2nd draft pack of 10 cards and picks one card to keep, forwarding the rest of 9 to the player to the right.
- Continue to do so till the complete draft pool is exhausted.
- In the end each player has drafted 80 cards. Add the fixed draft set, so there are 90 cards in total.
- Each player now builds a deck (minimum size of 50).
- Special rule: You have a rainbow capital board, containing a symbol for each race. You have both order and destruction cards in your deck.
- Special rule: You may have up to 5 copies of each card in the deck.
- Special rule: You may change the deck between rounds.
- Each player has to sleeve the cards used in the deck.
- After the tourney: the BPs are reconstructed into the original state.
- The winner of the tourney has the first chance to pick one BP he likes most. Then the second ranked player follows. Continue till all packs are gone.

Wytefang said:

The sooner you get over that LCGs are board games like the game, 'Dominion' , and not TCGs like Magic or Pokemon, the better off you will be. I recently stopped looking at LCGs like Trading Card Games after playing 'Dominion'.

Once I saw LCGs in new light, then I started to say to myself "Why can't we make pretty darn convincing variants like they do for Arkham, Talisman, Twilight Imperium, Small World, etc." And so this thread was born.

Some one in these forums once said "This is OUR game". They were right. It is in my honest opinion that "tourney crowds" kind of hurt this game. I was hoping they wouldn't look at the game the same way as say Magic. Eric Lang was clearly attempting to make a game that was cheap, expandable, and captured the warhammer theme. He succeeded.

James Hata is trying to convert a fandom game into a competitive game. Reminds me of the Warhammer MMORPG.

thorondor said:

Curator said:

It makes sense, at least as I would play it myself. I've always felt that with a game with predefined sides W:I, where some cards can work for one specific group of factions and another card can work for a completely different group, a draft variant would proceed the easiest if many of the limitations that are imposed in constructed are eliminated in draft. I would eliminate the construction rules completely in regards to what cards you can put in the deck. Mix order and destruction, and eliminate card limits (i.e. you could have any number of copies of a card in a deck). When playing, assume that the board you are playing with either has one of each symbol (probably the easiest to work), has no symbols at all (might be harder to work around), or start with two different symbols of the player's choice.

Provided you do not limit players to drafting just order or just destruction, it makes it much simpler to draft. Forcing somebody to stick with one side complicates matters too much for a randomized card pool and feels a lot like the old Star Wars TCG with their light side and dark side.

For the card pools, I would do much what was mentioned previously. I would allow each player a preset group of cards which they can have in their deck (Warpstone, Contested, Innovations, etc), purchase some product, and draft as normal with each player keeping the product they end up drafting.

For multiplayer, I would probably do a variant of magic's Two headed giant (call it the Alliance format maybe) and Emperor. In the Alliance format (2v2), you would have two players per team who would share resources, could play cards in each other's zones, but when one of the players were eliminated then at that point all of their cards left the table. The first team to have both players eliminated loses. For Emperor (3v3), each player could only attack the player on their left or right (i.e. you could not attack the Emperor and the Emperor could not attack until one of the flanks was eliminated), players can play cards in their zone or the Emperor's zones (or the Emperor could play his cards in either of his allies zones), but the team who loses their Emperor first loses the game.

David Nadler over at boardgamegeek.com came up with very interesting multiplayer variant.

www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/580081/multiplayer-glory-points-variant

In this variant you still full credit for full amount of damage, no kill stealing like other variants, and encourages attacking those are winning rather than ganging up on weakest player.

Rising Dragon said:

Imho, the multi-player variant you're referring to (Glory Points) appears to be the most promising of all the variants I've seen so far. I say "appears to be" because I haven't actually tried it yet.

The only potential problem I see with it, as written, is how it deals (or doesn't) with cards that produce large amounts of indirect damage. If we could come up with a suitable way to deal with cards like Descendant of Indraugnir and Great Book of Grudges, this might be a really fun multi-player variant.

Papa Khann

Thanks for posting these variant ideas! I haven't tried any drafting format yet though I'd really like to (I actually played W:I for the first time last night against an actual person instead of myself ). I like the idea of never playing against the same deck twice with your group. Using and playing against the same decks gets old fast. And it makes playing a bit more lightheart and less of a focus on "serious-business-ultra-decks-stomp-stomp-stomp".

So yeah...thanks again!