 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |||||||||
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
 | ||
| | |
 | ||
| | |
Here's some variants to spice up Elfenland... or ruin it. :-) You make the call. |
last update: November 15, 2004 | |||
| | | | |
 | ||
Playtested Variants Another Draw Variant Each player receives eight cards a turn, and then discards down to eight total. This is an attempt at a "best of both" variant, and is a variant of a variant already posted by Alan Moon. It is not necessary to hold players to a 4-card carryover from turn to turn when using this system. Drafting Counters & Cards 1) Each player draws one secret counter, as per the rules. 2) Deal out FOUR cards to each player. 3) Turn face up three CARDS and three TOKENS. Players take turns taking their choice, one card *or* one token (face up or mystery), for seven rounds. After the seventh round they must have taken four cards and three tokens. Last Turn Short Draw We've tried trimming down the number of cards received on that last turn. Giving out 4 instead of 8 seems to tune the game a bit. This is used with no discards. Playing With Young Children For those of you with young children (my son is 4 1/2), we play this simple variant. We don't use the counters. Each turn each player receives four cards. Use those cards for movement as normal (you don't need a counter on the road). My son seems to enjoy it, and it teachs a bit of planning (although he doesn't quite know enough to plan out his moves in advance). Conductor's Note: I have played Elfenland with my 3 1/2 year old son... we turn one card over at a time. If you can move with the card, you have to use it. If you can't play it, you save it for a later turn. The first person to get to all 20 cities wins. It's actually kind of fun - and Braeden loves the pictures on the board & the dragon cards. Traveling Non-Stop You may use one (or two) cards to move any distance (multiple cities) as long as all roads have the correct transport counter (rivers don't need a counter). Cities in between are not visited. Conductor's Note: Alan Moon himself gave this one a thumbs-up. Two Player Variants After playing 2-player Elfenland a few times, it seems the game needs some modification. The problem is that there is not enough interaction. Frequently, you're on different parts of the board, and you just go about your business building your own route. The game's alot more fun when you're in eachothers' hair -- both screwing up each others' plans, and taking opportunistic advantage of the other's counters. It seems to me the problem is one of counter density. In the four player game, up to 16 counters are placed on the board in each round.In the 2-player game, only 8 are. The higher the counter density, the more interaction there is. So, how can we increase the counter density for a 2-player game? One idea I had was to reduce the game to 3 (or even 2) rounds, while increasing the number of counters per round. You could have, say, 5 or 6 counters in each of 3 rounds (or 5, then 5, then 6), or 8 counters in each of 2 rounds. The latter would make the counter density the same as the regular game. However, you then only get 2 rounds. Perhaps, then, the thing to do is to have each player control 2 colors. Maybe you have to clear ALL of one color before starting the next. Or maybe there are no restrictions. In either case, you each get 8 counters per round (2 chosen randomly, 6 chosen from among the 5 face-up counters). Also, you'd get 16 cards per round instead of 8. The problem might be that the complexity would be too high -- too much to figure out! Yet another idea would be to restrict the size of the board. That would also increase the counter density. If you halved the size of the board, then you would also have to halve the number of rounds. Or, halve the size of the board, but put 2 tokens per city -- so you have to visit each city twice. Then, play 4 rounds, with the usual 4 counters and 8 cards per round. Boy, is Chuck a thoughtful guy - and after he got to think about it some more, he came to some conclusions... The basic idea is that, in 2-player Elfenland, the board is too sparse -- only 8 counters are played per round, vs 16 in a 4-player game (or 24 in a 6-player game). This means that there is very little interaction-- it's relatively rare that you can make use of the other player's travel counters, or mess them up by placing the "wrong" counter in their intended path. The first variant we tried addresses this problem directly: rather than drawing 4 counters and 8 cards per round, we tried drawing 8 counters and 16 cards! Then, we placed 2 tokens per city, rather than one (two different colors). So, one player uses, say, red and purple tokens, etc. There are still 4 rounds, but there are twice as many cards given out, and twice the number of tokens. This variant wasn't very satisfactory. There are just TOO many combinations! We gave up before the game was finished. In the second variant, we tried halving the size of the board. We just folded the board in half, and used the side with Grangor, Jaccaranda, etc. This board half seemed to have the most balanced terrain types -- the other half had only a single link of desert, for example. There are 11 cities on this half of the board. That means one could be used as the start city, and the other 10 as scoring cities. In this version, we each drew 4 counters and 8 cards per round, as usual. We placed 2 tokens per city -- both the same color this time. It worked out perfectly -- since there are 20 tokens of each color. We chose a city at random as the start city (by flipping the top city card -- we first removed the cities from the unused half of the board from the deck). We then dealt a city card to each of as, as per usual. The game played very much like the normal game, except that interaction was much more common, and decisive. It seemed to work quite well having 2 tokens per city. You could choose to sweep one part of the board at a time, or to do two complete circuits. Another twist was that there were two "doglegs". In the normal game, there is just one (i.e. a city which has only one access link -- you must enter and exit through the same link). This worked out quite well -- it was a difficult decision as to whether to attempt to clean out one or both of these doglegs. We've only played the variant once, so far, but it was much more satisfactory than the standard 2-player version of the game. Far more interactive. Conductor's Note: This is the variant we use in playing two player... and it works like a charm. Chuck is a genius. :-) A Different Two Player Variant First let me say that Elfenland is a great game with or without any variants. That said, my wife and I usually play the "draft four cards along with drafting the counters" variant. We've tried drafting only two cards, which speeds things up, but there's a little more luck involved. And we've played with a maximum hand of seven cards instead of eight, which makes the trouble counters all the more powerful, and puts a crimp in many cavern plans. My wife thought of another way to spice things up, which has become a part of our normal game--the following variant: Play as normal. After players have drawn their cards and counters, randomly select two city cards, find the shortest route between them, place randomly drawn counters along the route (drawing again in the case of illegal placement), and play from there. This variant forces players to use combinations of counter/terrian they wouldn't normly use in a two-player game: Trollwagons in mountians; clouds in forest... Also, it puts more importance on selecting the right cards. And it forces players to consider routes that would be discarded right away in a normal game.
Undeveloped Ideas The following variants have not (to my knowledge) been tested. Use at your own risk. Card Bidding I was sleepless the other night, tossing and turning, and my thoughts turned to Elfenlands. I like the concept of the auction as found in Elfenroads, and was trying to think of a way to integrate that back into Elfenlands, but without reintroducing gold. So I started mashing around the idea of using the cards as the currency of an auction for the counters. Something like this. Each player gets one counter, face down, as per current rules. Then 3 (or 2) times the number of players in counters are drawn and placed face down. One (or perhaps 5) of these counters is flipped face up. Whoever is in last place bids a number of cards for dibs on the first counter (or choice of the first counter). Bids go around the table till all pass. The winning bidder discards the number of cards he bid and takes the token and immediately plays it (kind of bidding on the token and order of counter play) and perhaps plays his dealt token also. One by one the counters are turned face up and bid on, winning bidders play the counter immediately. The next first bidder is person to the left of the winning bidder. If nobody bids on a (or any of the) counter(s) it is returned to the pile...and a new counter drawn? The counter auction ends? The next counter is flipped? Obviously this would slow down the game, in several ways (auction takes time, the number of cards available to use for movement is obviously reduced). The number of turns might need to be increased. Or the number of cards dealt. Or...??? Secret Token Placement In response to a question from Greg Aleknevicus, Brian Bankler suggested the possibility of placing secret/hidden tokens on the map face-down. The tokens would then be flipped face-up when all the placement was done. Conductor's Note: This could be a VERY sneaky variant... and also drop scores. Variable Number of Cards You know, this question has come up a lot lately, with opinion on both sides, as well as some possible fixes (like getting four cards, then drafting an additional four, etc.) But has anyone simply tried to play the game with fewer cards drawn? How about receive 6 cards each turn? Or if you want a few more cards in the game, but not too many, fill your hand up to 9 cards each turn. And Just For Grins... Elfenland for Grognards Not that I've played them, but a group of old grognards made up some variants because they hated the game. "It's too much fun," they said, "There aren't enough rules and doesn't fill 12 hours the way I'd like." Some (just some) of the things they swore would make the game "more realistic and challenging" were: ElfenWhack: A rule that would allow Elves to "whack" one another as they moved through the same space, forcing a random number of tokens to be dropped from the interecpted player. The pieces are scattered to adjacent towns. Movement ends. ElfenSturm: A weather rule. Remove all cloud chits and roll once on the Cyclone Table each time you move between towns. If a Cyclone strikes, pick a random city card and drop the unfortunate Elf(s) there. You can keep moving if you have cards left. Orc Raidz: Each turn, the First Elf draws a random city card. If anyone's there, they're mercilessly hacked to pieces and are eliminated from the game...UNLESS they have a Dragon, Unicorn, or Raft (in appropriate towns only) to carry them away to an adjacent space. (Discarded.) Departures One particular train out of here... the wonderful site, Poeppelkiste, has a plethora of variants available... in German! I've asked for permission to translate & publish them - until then, you can fire up the Babelfish and head over there yourself. | ||
| | |