I've noticed a lot of my games end up with a completely stagnant selection of tier1/2/3 cards as at a certain point the game becomes less about selecting/deploying ships and more about passing buys in order to save up to buy the colony cards as fast as possible. Strategically, not buying during a round prevents your opponent/s from getting a beneficial ship pickup, but also results in a kind of a lame situation for those that still need ships. The constant conveyor of ships makes the game a lot more interesting imo.
Rule Suggestion:
Black Hole Variant ("Black Hole" since the cards are being removed from the board/space)
<On condition>, discard the ship available for sale from each tier that's at the very right. Draw a new card and place it on the very left, moving all other cards to the right.
The <condition> here could be after each round, but that might be too favorable to the first player. So instead maybe after (n + 1) turns where n is the number of players. Possibly also need to trigger this after a certain time (any player crosses 20 victory points) or added incrementally (tier 1 gets sucked into the black hole from the beginning of the game, but tier 2 isn't included in the sweep until <some point>, etc. for tier 3). This would prevent the rightmost tier 2/3 from being removed before anyone has the chance to purchase it (although if something is really good and playing the Lightspeed variant, perhaps a strategic option would be to save gold for the first buy).
What do you guys think?
Rule Suggestion:
Black Hole Variant ("Black Hole" since the cards are being removed from the board/space)
<On condition>, discard the ship available for sale from each tier that's at the very right. Draw a new card and place it on the very left, moving all other cards to the right.
The <condition> here could be after each round, but that might be too favorable to the first player. So instead maybe after (n + 1) turns where n is the number of players. Possibly also need to trigger this after a certain time (any player crosses 20 victory points) or added incrementally (tier 1 gets sucked into the black hole from the beginning of the game, but tier 2 isn't included in the sweep until <some point>, etc. for tier 3). This would prevent the rightmost tier 2/3 from being removed before anyone has the chance to purchase it (although if something is really good and playing the Lightspeed variant, perhaps a strategic option would be to save gold for the first buy).
What do you guys think?