I'm a big fan of the game, but occasionally our playthroughs have become bogged down by certain variants. I'm curious what variants and/or house rules you people really like, as I want to avoid this problem in the future. Lets discuss our favorite/least favorite of them!

1) I love using Space Mines - it's a nice defensive touch without adding a complex new mechanic.

2) The Tribes of Yrril. Banned.

StarmanTTLB said:

Wow, that's some of the goofiest quoting I've seen a forum do. Editing the post to try and fix it only seems to make it worse. I apologize about that.

Not a bad idea, but does it pay off in play? The last few times the Tribes have been used in our games, the players have so many Action cards that they'd have no issues discarding a half dozen every turn...

Balancing the races is tough if you are trying to somehow maintain the mechanics that they already have in a new format, but if you use the existing races as kind of a guide you can come to some conclusions about the Tribes.

For starters they have one of the best starting conditions of any race, practically a racial ability in itself. You can't beat an openning round with XRD Transporters, 2 carriers and 5 ground forces. Combined with any number of strategy cards and the Tribes should by all accounts have the strongest start of any race even without their racial abilities. They are very strong at the start.

That aside however their action card abilities (both drawing more cards, holding more cards and being able to look at other players cards) are in themselves easily equivilant in terms of effectivness of any other racial ability. So even without the skipping ability they would remain one of the strongest races in the game.

The real issue with them is the skiping and the best variant I have seen used that kept them as an extremely effective race, but put them in line with the others is to simply remove that ability all together. Its simple, easy to remember and doesn't require you to change any rules.

As for the favorite variants. Prior to the latest expansion we kind of had a pretty firm view about how to setup a great TI3 game, but since the expansion we have found that we like to mix it up a great deal, the expansion really has revitilized our interest in the game. But just in general there are a few we tend to cling to.

Artifact Planets: We love this one because it promotes more action on the board and usually results in a quicker and more climatic ending.

Mectol Rex Protectors (or whatever they are called): We really like the fact that if you want to take Mecatol you have to fight something for it. I'm not sure how this affects the length of the game or wether its good or bad, but we just like it, it makes sense to us in some way. I don't recall playing a game without them since Shattered Empire was released.

Political Cards: We do not allow them to be traded in for trade goods, but we instead allow them to count as votes. This has had some interesting effects for us, the cards themselves became kind of a measure of a players political power and as the game grows it becomes more and more important as individual players accumilate them. We also use a rule that as an action a player can discard 4 cards and play a 5th card in which their is no voting, he simply decides the outcome of the political card, giving more clout to players with lots of political card and a way to spend them outside of the Assembly or whatever political strategy card you use.

We also have made some minor adjustments to races, the Xxcha for example may spend a command counter from strategy allocation as an action to draw 2 political cards once per game round. This gives them a nice skiping ability and a way to accumilate political card which works great combined with our variant for political cards.

We also like to play with Warfare I, instead of Warfare II, very religious about that, no one ever cared for Warfare II in our group (I think we might have used it once).

There are a few others but those come to mind as things that make it into every game.