First Player Advantage?

[Zhstalt]

If this were a 10 to 15 turn game this might be an argument. It’s a 35 to 40 game with a massively variable setup, drafted starting positions and radically different “engine” options. All this theoretic talk about 1st player advantage and what a turn is worth means little if you aren’t all the same skill level.

The average player scores 3 points per turn. The best players score 4. Pit the best players against each other and then see if there’s a real 1st mover advantage.

[Snapper67]

I would think at this point, you could run statistics on the games played here and see what the numbers say.

[Powderburned]

I have noticed that it truly does feel like player 1 has the advantage as well. With that stated not everyone may agree but perhaps we could get an option to vary the start with an option to have equal turns or starting gems to be different based on some of the previous suggestions.

Another suggestion may be to have a bid system for hubs to start where 1 more hub than the number of players are available to bid on. In this system each player would be given 3 times the number of players gems and bid on tiles then turn order would be based on remaining gems with lowest being first player. In the event of ties for remaining gems whoever won their bid first breaks the tie for turn order.