More balanced distribution of Wonders

[Murad_KZ]

Hi everyone!

It seems that one of the major factors of imbalance in 7WD arises from how the Wonders are distributed between the 2 players.

The first player obviously has an advantage in the game, so the second player should get slightly better Wonders as a compensation.

I was wondering if this would be achieved if the Wonders were not distributed in the snake draft manner in 2 rounds (the default method), but rather all the 8 wonders were offered at once, and the players would pick them one by one starting with the second player. So that the second player picks one of the 8 wonders, then the first player picks another one, then the second player and so on, until the first player picks the last 8th wonder.

Doing so would ensure that there wouldn’t be situations when one player gets 3 extra-turn wonders, and the other player gets just 1 (unless one of them blunders or decides to do so intentionally which would be a rare case). And in general, all the 8 wonders would be distributed in a way that the second player will get slightly better wonders.

P.S. there is also another factor of imbalance (or uncertainty I should say) which can be dealt with (perhaps it should be posted in a different thread, but I’ll post it here as I believe it’s somewhat related to the current topic). Wouldn’t it be nice if the Library would show the 3 science tokens it will offer to choose from in advance. So that it wouldn’t come as a surprise for both players when the library holding player gets or doesn’t get one of the powerful tokens (like Theology or Law) from the library. That is before players start picking wonders, they would already see what 3 tokens the library has to offer this time in this current game, and they would make decisions accordingly (whether to pick the library before some other wonders or not).

[Bread4Ducks]

I think having all 8 wonders would be a decent varient, the only problem would be that it would make games quite samey since people would probably end up with similar wonders each time (it's unlikely you would let your opponent have both "break a resource" wonders for example, but that happens a lot in the official rules) but if you don't mind that then it would work fine.

I'm not sure if having the 3 progress tokens be known, would make the wonder extremely OP though. If Strategy is visible for example then I can go all in on military early and I've got a good chance of winning. If it's uncertain if Strategy is one of the tokens though then I won't do that because I'll need a contingency in case Strategy isn't one of the tokens.

[Murad_KZ]

Well, the games have already become quite samey (not as samey as they would under this new drafting rule but still), and sometimes (not rarely) they are samey in a frustrating way, when one of the players gets much weaker wonders than the other one, and the result (odds) are basically known from the beginning when he/she can do practically nothing (of course if the rating of the stronger wonders player is much much lower then there are chances, but I’m considering more competitive cases).

As for the Library: if the Strategy token is visible to you, then it’s also visible to your opponent (as all 3 tokens of the library are already visible to both players before they starting picking wonders), and he/she will be aware of that: from the very moment you pick the library, then your opponent would treat the military threat very seriously and act accordingly - even grab more of military wonders before others (among other things). And besides that, if you rush to grab the library too soon, you might leave more of extra turn wonders for your opponent, which would be a decent compensation for him/her.