My suggestions for improving the game

[master114]

Hello!
I really liked this game and its mechanics.
I played about 10 games with different lineups of players and it seemed to me that the game was unbalanced. There are a lot of accidents in it, and the Queen behind comes inexorably.

In this game, the deductive ability is very important, both when laying out tiles and when guessing someone else's card. But in about 50% of cases, it is not possible to select a tile and lay it out so that it can be 100% guessed. This is especially difficult at the initial and final stages of the game.
Then you just have to guess the card of another player relying on luck and the Queen moves at twice the speed.
And if at the initial stage it is not so scary, since her normal speed is still low, then towards the end of the game it becomes critical.

For this reason, I would like to offer a couple of my ideas to the author of the game. It is possible that I am not an experienced player or have not yet understood all the possibilities, but communication with other players confirms my opinion.

The first idea is to put the White Rabbit on the track a little further apart. At least 2 and 3 marks. Then the Queen would not accelerate so fast and there would be more chances to win.
The second idea is that the Cheshire Cat add-on offers an additional task for an additional reward. But at the same time, the reward is as small as for a card of Medium difficulty, and I will lay out the tiles in such a way so that other players guess my card. Therefore, it can either be made easier, for example, a chain of 3 tiles, or made much more expensive, so that it makes sense to sacrifice your card for an expensive reward.

The third and most important suggestion. This is an opportunity to pass after laying out a tile. Currently, any player who places a tile on the board MUST choose another player's card to guess. I don't understand why there is no way to opt out of this and allow the Queen to move normally. If I failed to give enough hints to other players, I certainly understand that the Queen will walk at double the speed!

Maybe some of my suggestions can be used for the "light" version of the game. For teaching beginners, for example. Although it seems to me that this will just turn a very difficult version of the game into a normal version.

Thank you for your attention!

PS I used google translate

[smokva]

Good suggestions! Notice how few players with an ELO greater than 1.

[cigma]

In this game, the deductive ability is very important, both when laying out tiles and when guessing someone else's card. But in about 50% of cases, it is not possible to select a tile and lay it out so that it can be 100% guessed. This is especially difficult at the initial and final stages of the game.
Then you just have to guess the card of another player relying on luck

I was very much interested in this game and so I watched it played in a video. I had just the impression like you described, that it is only 50% a deduction game, the other 50% is guess by luck. Maybe it was designed that way on purpose. I consider this to be a lack in game design, because deductive games and push your luck games satisfy different player types / moods. Due to this dissapointment I haven't played it yet.

With a little twist this game could be really great, but unfortunately BGA won't implement any variant which is not authorized by the author.

[Tisaac]

I think the luck can be reduced using some meta informations/convention system. For instance, if everyone agree to only play "the tile allowing to place the most cubes for their card", you actually get a lot of information from a 0 slot since you know that none of the other tiles and none of the other locations could place a cube.
Another way to reduce luck is to always have a player with an easy card, at least for the first rounds. As you said, advancing too much on the track make the queen accelerate a lot, and you dont want that. So try to fill the board as much as possible at low speed, so dont go for hard cards right from the beginning.
That being said, i also feel that sometimes you can be a bit stuck depending on the pool of tiles available, would be nice to be able to flush it once per player per game or something like that.

[master114]

Recently played a game with experienced players. We made a mistake only once in the middle of the game. We guessed all the other cards, in some rounds there were 2 cards each. And yet we lost. We didn't have enough to put a few tiles and the Queen just caught up with us, as her speed was very high towards the end of the game.
There were several cases where you just had to guess, because it was not possible to give enough information. For a long time I have been using not just information from a tile on the field, but also analyzing why the other player did not use other tiles from the Greenhouse, as well as choosing from several options using different methods.
But I never won

[cigma]

The third and most important suggestion. This is an opportunity to pass after laying out a tile. Currently, any player who places a tile on the board MUST choose another player's card to guess. I don't understand why there is no way to opt out of this and allow the Queen to move normally. If I failed to give enough hints to other players, I certainly understand that the Queen will walk at double the speed!

In a 2 player game the team is allowed to do this 3 times during the course of the gameplay: skip the guess and the queen moves at normal speed.

I think it is a bit easier to play this game with 3-5 players, because you are more flexible which card to guess next. This special rule is then probably intended to provide a balance.

Has anyone here played with different numbers of players and can report on differences?

[sprockitz]

A little inference can help, in fact that is a large part of the game. another big part is setting things up for later...setting up so that you will have several different numbers on a given spot...like 3, 2, and 1. also playing slow intentionally is usually to your advantage if you are just trying to avoid being caught (going for high score seems to be the intended purpose, but just trying to win at first seems reasonable). So in 3-5 player this means often only guessing 1 card even when you know 2 so that you don't have to use a guess in a later turn. it also means moving slower so that the queen in turn also moves slower. In 2 player you can take advantage of those free skips before getting to 10 as it is an extra turn (or 3) as you setup the board.

[dgjxqz]

I think the difficulty is OK but ELO calculation disfavors low player count and you're stuck as apprentice for a while. Not sure how some games achieve 20-50 points though.
What's missing is an end turn confirmation with option to startover so that automatic mode can be more helpful.

[master114]

A little inference can help, in fact that is a large part of the game. another big part is setting things up for later...setting up so that you will have several different numbers on a given spot...like 3, 2, and 1. also playing slow intentionally is usually to your advantage if you are just trying to avoid being caught (going for high score seems to be the intended purpose, but just trying to win at first seems reasonable). So in 3-5 player this means often only guessing 1 card even when you know 2 so that you don't have to use a guess in a later turn. it also means moving slower so that the queen in turn also moves slower. In 2 player you can take advantage of those free skips before getting to 10 as it is an extra turn (or 3) as you setup the board.

I don't think this kind of card-guessing tactic in the later phase of the game can drastically change the results of the game.

[anima_aqua]

The interesting thing in the game itself I think is that they mention your final score is where you got to on the board minus ten points if you got decapitated. Then you should be trying to better that score on the next time you play. Therefore I think the game is actually fine, it’s more the concept of „win“ / „lose“ on bga that should perhaps be rethought?