Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-27590489-20160117042839

Today's adventure was with 4-player variants. Everyone-vs-Everyone-Else, Teams and Assassin. Balance held up surprisingly well even although that was where I figured the problems would be. I doubt going outside the pre-builts would work without further modification but we only had the initial 5 pre-builts so there weren't any problems. I figure if people have bad spatial relation skills (for SIGNI zones at angles) it would be a problem but everyone at the table was a designer or an engineer so there was no trouble.

EvsEE - This was actually really fun. A complete caconphony of battoru in all directions. Nothing lived very long at all. I'd love to try this when my other pre-built decks arrive.

Teams - This actually took the most tweaking (and a few tries). I'll call the teams A and B and players A1, A2, B1 and B2. The best turn order seemed to be A1, B1, A2, B2. Allowing players to Guard for their teammates seemed to be ok and not too disruptive. Sharing ener zones, LRIG decks and hands is out of the question as that's just too powerful. Also found that cards that target all opposing SIGNI only affect one opponent. Like with EvsEE the dynamic of spreading attacks between different players was really fun. But man SIGNI don't live very long LOL.

Assassin - Assassin is really meant to be done with, like, 8+ people but there are only 5 decks here and 4 players. For those who don't know, Assassin is a variant where you put everyone's name into a hat. Everyone draws a name and keeps it secret. Although you can attack anyone the first player you kill has to be the person you drew the name of. If not, you lose too. When you kill your target you discard their name and take whatever name they had as your new target. If you draw or inherrit you own name you can kill whoever you want but of course once you do you get their name and are no longer a rogue.

All of the problems we encounted had to do more with 4-player Assassin than with Assassin Wixoss. It's just too few people. In game 1 we were all rogues at the start. Although, unlike with MtG, Assassin Wixoss has a pretty cool feature. I admit I haven't played much but Wixoss seems to have a sense of frantic despiration when the Life Cloth runs low which I find is missing in MtG. As somebody can actually sit at 0 Life Cloth and still put up a crazy strong resistance Assassin was a lot... sneakier here. People get dropped to 0 Life Cloth and are still unsure of who is actually trying to kill them. That was pretty exciting.

TL;DR = If you have the skill to tell where Signi Zones line up when players aren't sitting across from each other, and can handle sticking to the pre-builts, these three variants are pretty fun for those who can play with irl. 