Howdy,

Thank you for the nice Twilight Imperium community here. I've enjoyed reading through the threads and have learned quite a lot, though I'll admit to being a fairly new player of the game.

On to my topic...

My group has been playing using the base game with the Age Of Empire variant because we prefer being able to see all of the public objective cards and to play for a set number of rounds instead of to a victory point total.

We'd like to play our next game using the full set of strategy cards from the Shattered Empire expansion, including the Bureaucracy card, but we'd like to be able to keep the Age Of Empire way of handling the public objectives. I've come up with a solution and would like to bounce the idea off of the experienced folks here to see if I'm way off track or have come up with a decent compromise.

My proposed solution for my group...

1. Use the set of eight strategy cards from Shattered Empire, including Bureaucracy.
2. Set up the deck of public objective cards with the number of rounds we prefer to play, as per the Age Of Empire variant.
3. Photocopy the set of public objective cards from the constructed deck and give everyone a copy (this preserves everyone knowing what the set of public objective cards will be and folks can do some planning ahead).
4. Shuffle the Stage I public objective cards from the deck, shuffle the Stage II public objective cards from the deck, then put them back together to form the deck of public objective cards (this makes it so nobody knows the order in which each stage's public objectives will become available for fulfillment).
5. Execution of the Bureaucracy strategy card is performed as normal to reveal public objective cards.
6. A token can still be used as per the Age Of Empire variant to keep track of the number of turns played.

Wow, that seems a lot more complex written out vs. when I thought it through in my head. I guess that's why games have so many pages of rules ... it can take a lot of words to describe a game mechanic.

Any comments on my proposed solution for my group are appreciated, as well as suggestions for other ways to maybe accomplish our goals.

Cheers.

It's probably a lot easier to just write down all the objective cards on one publicly available list than to photocopy the cards for each player before beginning the game.

I'd also wonder about the practical ability to "plan ahead" if you don't know which objectives will be available in the next turn or two.

You could just lay the cards out ala Age of Empire and then use some neutral marker (ie: a flag from a race that isn't in play) to mark which objectives are currently available. Everything to the left of (and including) the neutral flag may be claimed. When it comes time to do the "draw 2 pick 1" bit, the player in control of the SC may swap the order of the next two objectives at his discretion before moving the flag for the last time.

Steve-O said:

Thank you for the suggestion on how to handle the Bureaucracy strategy card - that's really what I was having the most trouble figuring out - a way to both make sense and still be of value to the person who picked it. I'll probably go with your suggestion.

Thank you!

I found an interesting similar suggestion on combining the Bureaucracy strategy card with the Age of Empire variant. It is called the Red Tape variant, and goes like this...

Lay out the public objective cards face up as per the Age of Empire variant.

Put a token on each public objective card, thus binding it up in bureaucratic red tape - aka such marked publc objectives cannot be claimed.

When someone executes the primary ability of the Bureaucracy strategy card, they get to choose a public objective card and remove the "red tape" token, thus making it available to be claimed. For the first three rounds of the game only Stage I public objective cards can have their "red tape" token removed.

Awesome! My group is going to give this Red Tape variant a try the next time we play. Thought I'd share here in case anyone else was looking for another way to combine the Bureaucracy strategy card with the Age of Empire variant.

Cheers!