Change of Neutral Flower management

[SuperPello]

Hi all,
in 2p players game we saw that who start second at the beginning will have big chances of victory.
Being first with choice before 2 items column AND using neutral flower for avoiding a good choice to opponent is too much.

I'm testing with some players an house rule: the second player make the choice for neutral flower, not the first. This rule works better than original and I would like to propose this to BGA developers.

If the neutral flower rule will be changed, we could play 2p games in Arena.

[Azygos11]

I'm agree with SuperPello.This house rule works and makes it possible to play 2p game in a balanced way

[kei-ring]

I agree.
Or It would also be a good idea to prohibit stacking on the first square.

[thegenie333]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve played over 100 games 2p, ranked top 3 ELO at one point and just recently got into 3p arena games. I’ve also played about a dozen games in person, both 3p and 4p.

This is certainly one of my favorite games now, but I completely agree that 2p is very broken, that whoever goes second on the first turn always wins the game, and it is impossible for the other player to win.

However, after playing 7 or 8 games with this “house rule” of the second player moves the neutral flower every round, I don’t agree that it fixes the problem. While it is better, going last on the first turn is still too strong.

In fact, after playing several 3p arena games, I think that there needs to be some overall adjusting to the whole game. The bottom row action in the dark columns is just way overpowered, and if you go last on the first turn (both 2p and 3p) you can always get it, and generally quite easily win.

My untested proposition to make the game more balanced in all 2p, 3p and 4p games:
- Make stacking on the top action in the light columns cost the same as the rest ($3, $6, $9)
- Switch the polka-dot flower tiles with the stripe flower tiles during setup. This makes it that all 4 actions will be closer to equal strength and more likely that a player may give up the bottom row action or give other players stronger moves that don’t get the bottom row.
- Reverse the starting order of the boards. p4 is a very strong board already and going last on the first turn is too strong.

I don’t know how to get beta bests on BGA but if someone knows how to test things like this, I think it would be good to test before proposing these changes to the designers.