From: Allan Bell Subject: 1630 Something variant rules. Trying to get a bit more on-topic :-) For those of you who played "1630 Something" and soon found the flaws... We had shelved "1630 something" earlier as the rules just did not work. Danny Stevens, having invested good money in the game, decided to see if he could fix some of the problems. We tried out his modified rules last Friday night and the game went quite well. Basically the major rules changes was : * the limit of cards you can hold is no longer fixed at 13 but declines towards the end of the game which stops players from locking up cards like Assassin and Unrest. While you can still lock them up, you pay a much bigger penalty in limiting your strategy. * the introduction of a new concept called the marketplace. Each turn you discard one card from your hand into the marketplace. Also cards get into the marketplace from upgrading influence on a country or from assassinations. At the end of a turn the marketplace cards are revealed. The first player can swap a card from his hand for any card from the other marketplaces (but not his own). Then the second player etc. If you are the first player for that turn then it is useful to assassinate a high-value card for a country you control and then pick it up from the marketplace at the end of the turn. A second round lets everyone pick up one card for free from others marketplaces and their own. Any cards left over go into the discard. * Setting a limit of 3 influence cards per country. You could swap an influence 1 for, say, and influence 2 in your turn but the influence 1 would go into the marketplace. This means you have to choose your influence carefully. Also having a country go into decline can have a bigger impact. That's all I remember. Danny will write up the rule changes and we'll get them posted somewhere. We do need to playtest it a bit more but the results seemed much better than the games we played under the official rules. Allan