In 7 Wonders Duel, the first player appears to have a significant advantage, with BGA data suggesting a win rate of around 55%.
The simplest way to reduce this imbalance would be to give the second player a small VP compensation.
I think a fractional VP bonus would work better than an integer bonus: for example, +0.5, +1.5 or +2.5 VP. Besides compensating for the first-player advantage, this would also eliminate the need for the current tiebreaker.
Personally, I have never found the current tiebreaker — points from blue cards — particularly convincing. Something like remaining coins modulo 3 would arguably reflect actual efficiency better. But with a half-point compensation, this question disappears entirely: tied scores simply become impossible.
The real question is therefore the size of the compensation.
I suspect +0.5 VP is too small to compensate for the disadvantage of going second. +2.5 VP may ultimately be appropriate, but +1.5 VP seems like the more conservative value to test first. It would be a relatively small rule change, and BGA has more than enough game data to evaluate its effect statistically.
There is also an interesting precedent in The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth: the second player starts with one additional coin. Given the different economic scale of the two games, that bonus is substantial and suggests that compensating the second player is already considered a reasonable balancing mechanism in this system.
I would therefore like to propose Second Player: +1.5 VP as an optional variant on BGA.
If testing shows that it meaningfully improves the first/second-player balance, I would also support eventually using such a compensation in Arena. With the enormous number of games played on BGA, this is exactly the kind of small balance adjustment that could be tested empirically rather than only debated theoretically.
I hope other players would be interested in trying it, and perhaps it could eventually receive official recognition as a competitive variant.
The simplest way to reduce this imbalance would be to give the second player a small VP compensation.
I think a fractional VP bonus would work better than an integer bonus: for example, +0.5, +1.5 or +2.5 VP. Besides compensating for the first-player advantage, this would also eliminate the need for the current tiebreaker.
Personally, I have never found the current tiebreaker — points from blue cards — particularly convincing. Something like remaining coins modulo 3 would arguably reflect actual efficiency better. But with a half-point compensation, this question disappears entirely: tied scores simply become impossible.
The real question is therefore the size of the compensation.
I suspect +0.5 VP is too small to compensate for the disadvantage of going second. +2.5 VP may ultimately be appropriate, but +1.5 VP seems like the more conservative value to test first. It would be a relatively small rule change, and BGA has more than enough game data to evaluate its effect statistically.
There is also an interesting precedent in The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth: the second player starts with one additional coin. Given the different economic scale of the two games, that bonus is substantial and suggests that compensating the second player is already considered a reasonable balancing mechanism in this system.
I would therefore like to propose Second Player: +1.5 VP as an optional variant on BGA.
If testing shows that it meaningfully improves the first/second-player balance, I would also support eventually using such a compensation in Arena. With the enormous number of games played on BGA, this is exactly the kind of small balance adjustment that could be tested empirically rather than only debated theoretically.
I hope other players would be interested in trying it, and perhaps it could eventually receive official recognition as a competitive variant.