Fine if you enjoy your house rule. It's your game, play it however you want. More fun for you and it's the point of games. Personally, i would never, ever touch that rule. It totally destroys the market mechanic and severely highten the luck factor. The point of the market system is to be able to see the cards coming. A sought after card that just came in is always too expansive, but if you let it slide, you can get it cheaper. However, while you let it slide, someone else might just grab it... and THIS creates part of the tension amd fun of the game. It's a disguised auction system really if you think about it. With this house rule, you can grab whatever before your opponents have had a chance to get it, or bid for it. What's the point of the market system in this case? This is why i usually hate house rules. They break the design and unbalance it most of the time. This is the case here.
With that house rule of yours, I don't see a reason why anyone would ever leave spices behind on cards they don't want to get to the cards they do want. If this doesn't happen it would drastically alter the resource management of the game imo.
Totally agree, the market mechanic is one of the highlights of spice road, this change just kills the game interaction. You now have no reason to care about the other players at all, at this point just play it solitaire.
I think this house rule breaks the game in several ways others have already described. However an alternative would be to give up 2 cards from your hand to take any 1 card (instead of exchanging them). It’s a steep price, but ensures a new card will come out of the stack into the market just as if you had spent the crystals to do so.
I agree with most of the comments here. I've played the game many times with many different people and, in my opinion, this house rule would take out a lot of the fun and tension. I would like to try your house rule once but I doubt anyone in my gaming circle would want to. Why mess with something that already works so well?
This game is an Economic Engine Builder at heart, you build your Engine by trying to make shrewd choices in the face of a somewhat unforecastable economy. The strategy you employ often involves a complex string of choices across turns that can easily be scuppered by another players choices. This house rule ruins the hard earned advantages of the shrewder player, penalising them by devaluing the choices he has made so far, It devalues all the cards that are available as the swap is only one-for-one regardless of it’s position on the table, you will be leaving a poor card behind which no one is likely to want, if this is done often enough the table cards will stagnate, all in all you are therefore undermining the true in-game economy. ...Boohoo I don’t have the cards I need to win :( think about where you went wrong, learn from your mistakes, do better next time!
So on turn1 everyone will just swap their starter cards for the best cards on the table without paying any gems? Sounds like it would remove a lot of the charm
That will totally break the rule, for example if 2 people waiting for the same card, and suddenly someone jumped in to get it by using the card in his hands, add the luck factor.
I don’t know how to break this to you, but the guy who is winning the game can also use your rule. Or is your rule that only the person in last place can swap cards? I also don’t know how to break it to you, but there is a reason that it takes three turns to get that card according to the actual rules. I’m sorry if that is not fun for you, don’t play the game.
Thanks, this works for you. I don't think this is a good way to play. Piling gems up in my caravan takes up slots, I. Order to gain more gems or better gems or gain the full amount of gems via a card, I need precious slots. If I'm taking an "expensive" card via a swap. Those yellow gems will remain in my caravan taking up valuable slots. Also I enjoy watching the cards go down in value as they move to the left. Same rule in suburbia, works well. Also gaining the gems off the cards is great.
Play the game however you like but this variant rule isn't for me this time. I don't disapprove of changing rules of games though. It's only a game and you should do whatever increases your enjoyment of it.
can you tell me which one is right about this bonus card effect from century golem edition , its says "when you playing a card with this icon , you may return a previously played merchant card back into you hand".. i'm little confused about how it works .. which one is it ? - can take any 1 merchant card from player's discard pile or - can only take the last merchant card we played ( top card on the player's discard pile )
Just discussed this new house rule with a friend of mine who also enjoys the game, and we both agreed that the addition of an action in which you can swap any card from your hand for a new card from the market....kind of makes the mechanic of purchasing cards using crystals obsolete. Why pay for a card you want by depleting your crystal supply/aiding your opponent by placing crystals on the market cards when you could just do a quick swap right? An alternative house rule we discussed was to have a fixed 'breakdown/selling cost' for every card in the market (other than your starting cards, those cannot be broken down). In addition to the other actions you can take already on your turn, you could also breakdown/sell 1 card from your hand back to the market deck for a fixed 3 crystals. This would reduce the no. of turns it takes to make purchases with crystals, but also keep the engine/handbuilding element of the game intact.
If you enjoy it more, then keep playing that way. It’s your game. No need to ask for people’s opinion. Of course, there’s a few minor squabbles. Allowing everyone, even the leaders, to swap out junk cards without placing gems will eventually clog up the line. A simple way you could jumpstart the game is giving additional starting crystals! Give everyone double the amount of starting crystals the game recommends. People will get cards and build their engine a little faster, but it won’t break the game. For future games, give gems according to rank order instead of seating order. Have fun!
It isn't a bad rule. But, I don't find it necessary either. I don't mind having "junk cards" in my hand since it isn't necessary tp lay through your whole deck before picking up. Very good quality on your video production though. Keep it up!
Actually it shouldn’t take all those turns to get the card, because other players would be taking cards as well.. right? never played, just assuming as I am familiar with the rules.
If it's early game yes, but later in the game players don't take cards as much because they have the ones they want and are just executing their engines.
So do you still allow the left most card to be taken for free on your turn OR take any card further down the line but you can exchange a card for it? What about if you would rather play a crystal or two to keep your cards vs giving up a card? Is that rule still in affect too?
*groan* if you're behind in the game, you shouldn't have made bad choices. I've never grabbed a card that was 4 of 5 deep ever and I've played many, many times and won many , many times. As a player, try learning from your mistakes and doing better next time.
Are you describing that only the players not in the lead have this option? If so, how do you determine that when point cards are not shown faceup after claiming them?
You could restrict the rule further by having a card that does the swap. That way, you can't abuse it, and it requires at least one "nothing" turn to recover the card. You could even have that card go into peoples' hand only if the market isn't touched for a certain number of turns. I agree with other posters that the point of the market is the difficulty in acquiring cards and pvp aspects. How's this rule been working out for you recently?
I appreciate the effort in making a video, with all the editing, and the speaker's very engaging. But this video is completely useless given how it describes in details how to change a great game by adding a completely unnecessary rule. CSR does not suffer that much from what you describe given that the points are hidden, so you may not find out before the end how much you were lagging. Not to mention that even if you're behind on your engine, you can sometimes finish the game early by going for cheap cards and leave other players before they've had the chance to grab expensive score cards.
VERY late to the party, but I love this game and as practically everyone has mentioned, this is a very misguided "fix". The opportunity cost to get the better cards is almost non-existent, the market gets clogged up and stalled with bad cards, and it defeats the purpose and tactical necessities of the game. With that said, the main idea of "be able to get good cards through alternative means" can work, but it must be tweaked in order to not diminish the mechanisms of the game. I see several options that could work, and they all add some opportunity cost where you must meet another requirement while also getting rid of the "swap" idea altogether, which was nonsense to begin with. 1) each player simply can trash a card for your pick of the market only once per game 2) OR players can only do this IF they currently have no gems in their caravan 3) OR players can only do this IF the card they'd like to get rid of is currently exhausted/used Aaaand the one that breaks the game the least, and thus, my favorite is: 4) For purposes of dropping gems in the market in order to reach a card farther away, normal merchant cards count as 1 gem, production cards count as 2 gems, and upgrade cards count as 3 gems. You can only discard 1 card per turn to do this. This gives you a small advantage the more cards you have, and this tweak naturally helps the players in worst positions (if you spent your turns amassing useless cards, you will naturally be behind the others, with more cards to trash). The advantage given here is small, as most players will not get rid of production and upgrade cards usually, so all this does is give you an extra gem to spend towards the market at the cost of a card. Used on its own, it only lets you skip 1 market card. You'd still need gems to pay the rest of the cost--and here's a nice tiny touch, given that doing it this way doesn't give you enough gems to cover every market card you've skipped: if you've paid with a card and paid the rest in gems, the gems that are placed on market cards are placed counting from the farthest card first, meaning the first card doesn't get anything on it if you trashed a 1-gem card. Trashing a 2-gem card means the first 2 market cards don't get a gem on them, and so on. That way, cards with more gems will be farther back, and other players must invest something in order to get that haul. As an incidental bonus, this trashing of cards could eventually create a communal secondary "underworld" market with discarded cards where swaps and/or gem costs are a possibility for other players, so there is a chance a card you wanted but someone else took, could eventually be available again at an extra cost. This got my brain juices flowing!
it really isn't a good rule. first if someone just took a card and that one was just revealed and it was an amazing card the person whose turn just happened may get upset. That is the reason you end up having to pay all those gems to get that card rather than the ones that have been out longer. Second the game is set pretty evenly at the beginning and the game isn't very long anyhow so if you took cards that aren't much help to you you have the option to rest earlier and learn from your mistakes for next game
I love the game as is. There’s no need for a catch up mechanism. Heck even my 6 year old daughter has beat us. She had a better strategy and plan. And luck comes into play a bit but that’s ok I think.
Crazy amount of dislikes. Not sure why, if you enjoy it that's you. For me I wouldn't try it, it breaks the market, you can just pick a free card and exchange it next turn with a more expensive card. Makes no sense to me.
I was looking for videos about this game again, and stumbled upon this video, very pleased to find out that I disliked this video. I'm sorry man but the whole point of the game is having to figure out how to get the cards you want. And yes sometimes you take the first card just to get the gems. In that case, you don't care too much about the card. But now taking the least expensive one is one of the best moves, because you almost always get gems, and you get a card to trade with. I played this game many times, and almost never lost. And I think I have a good grasp on how this game works. Get rid of this house rule. It's not teaching you anything about the game.
I think this rule is awful and completely alters the game for bad. I think it would be better if you could discard one or more non-initial initial cards, either out of the game or to the bottom of the deck, to place yellow gems equal to the cards discarded, on cards on the market as if you were using regular gems on your cart to buy a card far on the line. You could still place from your cart as normal.
In lui of the many points I've read in the comments that I agree with, I would recommend an alternate to just the swap. I would say allowing someone to pay cards instead of gems, (by placing them underneath the current card,) as well as a 1:1 card swap (for as many cards as picked up), to prevent new cards from populating. This would prevent too much manipulation of the card flow, still provide some alternative to giving up too many gems, allow some sense of control as to which cards you're willing to stack, and could still come a steep enough cost to prevent a constant string of sudden unbalancings in repeat playthoughs. However, this currently an untested mechanic idea, and would need playtesting to be narrowed down to efficiency.
Usually I dont like house rules and I think the designers/publishers had made a lot of playtests to see whats works and whats dont. But, for the very first time I see that this specific rule can add more potencial to the game. Maybe, and just maybe, I see a problem with take a card only to take the gem (or the spice, in the original version) in that and, next turn, trade that card again. So, I not sure if it will works, but I will give a try. Said that, I really like yuor propose in the channel (I saw the thread in Reedit and went here).
Its amazing how everyone piles on with 'this breaks the game' yet I know no one has tried it. If you had tried it you would understand how this effects the economy of cards. The more cards you have in your engine the more efficient you will be. With this rule you are giving up a card that you likely will never play for a card that will (fun!), but it won't increase your card economy so you haven't gained as much as someone who could buy the card with gems (people will still use gems!). So if you are doing well there is no reason for you to use this rule because you will likely want all of your cards. With that being said, I think there does need to be an additional price to swapping cards. You are introducing a way in two turns to get 'hard to get cards'. That isn't quite an equal exchange. The efficiency of everyone's engine is going to go way up, two cards for one may be more fair, or possibly additional gems, coins, or point card.
Fine if you enjoy your house rule. It's your game, play it however you want. More fun for you and it's the point of games.
Personally, i would never, ever touch that rule.
It totally destroys the market mechanic and severely highten the luck factor.
The point of the market system is to be able to see the cards coming. A sought after card that just came in is always too expansive, but if you let it slide, you can get it cheaper. However, while you let it slide, someone else might just grab it... and THIS creates part of the tension amd fun of the game. It's a disguised auction system really if you think about it.
With this house rule, you can grab whatever before your opponents have had a chance to get it, or bid for it. What's the point of the market system in this case?
This is why i usually hate house rules. They break the design and unbalance it most of the time. This is the case here.
With that house rule of yours, I don't see a reason why anyone would ever leave spices behind on cards they don't want to get to the cards they do want. If this doesn't happen it would drastically alter the resource management of the game imo.
Totally agree, the market mechanic is one of the highlights of spice road, this change just kills the game interaction. You now have no reason to care about the other players at all, at this point just play it solitaire.
Makes sense.
This rule totally breaks the game.
I think this house rule breaks the game in several ways others have already described. However an alternative would be to give up 2 cards from your hand to take any 1 card (instead of exchanging them). It’s a steep price, but ensures a new card will come out of the stack into the market just as if you had spent the crystals to do so.
I agree with most of the comments here. I've played the game many times with many different people and, in my opinion, this house rule would take out a lot of the fun and tension. I would like to try your house rule once but I doubt anyone in my gaming circle would want to. Why mess with something that already works so well?
With this rule the game become pointless having gems
I don’t think your accounting for the fact that cards will slide down to the left when people buy cards.
This game is an Economic Engine Builder at heart, you build your Engine by trying to make shrewd choices in the face of a somewhat unforecastable economy. The strategy you employ often involves a complex string of choices across turns that can easily be scuppered by another players choices. This house rule ruins the hard earned advantages of the shrewder player, penalising them by devaluing the choices he has made so far, It devalues all the cards that are available as the swap is only one-for-one regardless of it’s position on the table, you will be leaving a poor card behind which no one is likely to want, if this is done often enough the table cards will stagnate, all in all you are therefore undermining the true in-game economy.
...Boohoo I don’t have the cards I need to win :( think about where you went wrong, learn from your mistakes, do better next time!
So on turn1 everyone will just swap their starter cards for the best cards on the table without paying any gems? Sounds like it would remove a lot of the charm
Not to mention that the market row now consists of only the starter cards...which nobody wants!
That will totally break the rule, for example if 2 people waiting for the same card, and suddenly someone jumped in to get it by using the card in his hands, add the luck factor.
I don’t know how to break this to you, but the guy who is winning the game can also use your rule. Or is your rule that only the person in last place can swap cards? I also don’t know how to break it to you, but there is a reason that it takes three turns to get that card according to the actual rules. I’m sorry if that is not fun for you, don’t play the game.
Thanks, this works for you. I don't think this is a good way to play. Piling gems up in my caravan takes up slots, I. Order to gain more gems or better gems or gain the full amount of gems via a card, I need precious slots. If I'm taking an "expensive" card via a swap. Those yellow gems will remain in my caravan taking up valuable slots. Also I enjoy watching the cards go down in value as they move to the left. Same rule in suburbia, works well. Also gaining the gems off the cards is great.
Play the game however you like but this variant rule isn't for me this time. I don't disapprove of changing rules of games though. It's only a game and you should do whatever increases your enjoyment of it.
can you tell me which one is right about this bonus card effect from century golem edition , its says "when you playing a card with this icon , you may return a previously played merchant card back into you hand".. i'm little confused about how it works .. which one is it ?
- can take any 1 merchant card from player's discard pile
or
- can only take the last merchant card we played ( top card on the player's discard pile )
Just discussed this new house rule with a friend of mine who also enjoys the game, and we both agreed that the addition of an action in which you can swap any card from your hand for a new card from the market....kind of makes the mechanic of purchasing cards using crystals obsolete. Why pay for a card you want by depleting your crystal supply/aiding your opponent by placing crystals on the market cards when you could just do a quick swap right?
An alternative house rule we discussed was to have a fixed 'breakdown/selling cost' for every card in the market (other than your starting cards, those cannot be broken down). In addition to the other actions you can take already on your turn, you could also breakdown/sell 1 card from your hand back to the market deck for a fixed 3 crystals. This would reduce the no. of turns it takes to make purchases with crystals, but also keep the engine/handbuilding element of the game intact.
I was planning on doing something like this for solitaire play.
If you enjoy it more, then keep playing that way. It’s your game. No need to ask for people’s opinion.
Of course, there’s a few minor squabbles. Allowing everyone, even the leaders, to swap out junk cards without placing gems will eventually clog up the line.
A simple way you could jumpstart the game is giving additional starting crystals! Give everyone double the amount of starting crystals the game recommends. People will get cards and build their engine a little faster, but it won’t break the game.
For future games, give gems according to rank order instead of seating order.
Have fun!
Totally Agree. How do you give Gems based on rank order?
It isn't a bad rule. But, I don't find it necessary either. I don't mind having "junk cards" in my hand since it isn't necessary tp lay through your whole deck before picking up.
Very good quality on your video production though. Keep it up!
Actually it shouldn’t take all those turns to get the card, because other players would be taking cards as well.. right? never played, just assuming as I am familiar with the rules.
If it's early game yes, but later in the game players don't take cards as much because they have the ones they want and are just executing their engines.
Yeah, I'm good on this. This alters the games integrity right out the gate.
So do you still allow the left most card to be taken for free on your turn OR take any card further down the line but you can exchange a card for it? What about if you would rather play a crystal or two to keep your cards vs giving up a card? Is that rule still in affect too?
you are talking into the wrong part of your mic for most of this video. you should be aiming for the logo.
very bad idea man... you're destroying one of the main puzzles of this game.
So, do you still use this rule?
I would modify this by not allowing you to swap a starting card for a face-up card. That would leave a card on the table that no one would ever buy.
That way you'll get the market filled with bad cards at the first rounds after everybody take the good cards.
nop takes out all the charm and anticipation that the other player takes your card.
*groan* if you're behind in the game, you shouldn't have made bad choices. I've never grabbed a card that was 4 of 5 deep ever and I've played many, many times and won many , many times. As a player, try learning from your mistakes and doing better next time.
No
Are you describing that only the players not in the lead have this option? If so, how do you determine that when point cards are not shown faceup after claiming them?
You could restrict the rule further by having a card that does the swap. That way, you can't abuse it, and it requires at least one "nothing" turn to recover the card. You could even have that card go into peoples' hand only if the market isn't touched for a certain number of turns.
I agree with other posters that the point of the market is the difficulty in acquiring cards and pvp aspects.
How's this rule been working out for you recently?
I appreciate the effort in making a video, with all the editing, and the speaker's very engaging. But this video is completely useless given how it describes in details how to change a great game by adding a completely unnecessary rule.
CSR does not suffer that much from what you describe given that the points are hidden, so you may not find out before the end how much you were lagging. Not to mention that even if you're behind on your engine, you can sometimes finish the game early by going for cheap cards and leave other players before they've had the chance to grab expensive score cards.
VERY late to the party, but I love this game and as practically everyone has mentioned, this is a very misguided "fix". The opportunity cost to get the better cards is almost non-existent, the market gets clogged up and stalled with bad cards, and it defeats the purpose and tactical necessities of the game.
With that said, the main idea of "be able to get good cards through alternative means" can work, but it must be tweaked in order to not diminish the mechanisms of the game. I see several options that could work, and they all add some opportunity cost where you must meet another requirement while also getting rid of the "swap" idea altogether, which was nonsense to begin with.
1) each player simply can trash a card for your pick of the market only once per game
2) OR players can only do this IF they currently have no gems in their caravan
3) OR players can only do this IF the card they'd like to get rid of is currently exhausted/used
Aaaand the one that breaks the game the least, and thus, my favorite is:
4) For purposes of dropping gems in the market in order to reach a card farther away, normal merchant cards count as 1 gem, production cards count as 2 gems, and upgrade cards count as 3 gems. You can only discard 1 card per turn to do this. This gives you a small advantage the more cards you have, and this tweak naturally helps the players in worst positions (if you spent your turns amassing useless cards, you will naturally be behind the others, with more cards to trash). The advantage given here is small, as most players will not get rid of production and upgrade cards usually, so all this does is give you an extra gem to spend towards the market at the cost of a card. Used on its own, it only lets you skip 1 market card. You'd still need gems to pay the rest of the cost--and here's a nice tiny touch, given that doing it this way doesn't give you enough gems to cover every market card you've skipped: if you've paid with a card and paid the rest in gems, the gems that are placed on market cards are placed counting from the farthest card first, meaning the first card doesn't get anything on it if you trashed a 1-gem card. Trashing a 2-gem card means the first 2 market cards don't get a gem on them, and so on. That way, cards with more gems will be farther back, and other players must invest something in order to get that haul.
As an incidental bonus, this trashing of cards could eventually create a communal secondary "underworld" market with discarded cards where swaps and/or gem costs are a possibility for other players, so there is a chance a card you wanted but someone else took, could eventually be available again at an extra cost.
This got my brain juices flowing!
nnnnnnn.🤔.nope.
it really isn't a good rule. first if someone just took a card and that one was just revealed and it was an amazing card the person whose turn just happened may get upset. That is the reason you end up having to pay all those gems to get that card rather than the ones that have been out longer. Second the game is set pretty evenly at the beginning and the game isn't very long anyhow so if you took cards that aren't much help to you you have the option to rest earlier and learn from your mistakes for next game
I love the game as is. There’s no need for a catch up mechanism. Heck even my 6 year old daughter has beat us. She had a better strategy and plan. And luck comes into play a bit but that’s ok I think.
Crazy amount of dislikes. Not sure why, if you enjoy it that's you.
For me I wouldn't try it, it breaks the market, you can just pick a free card and exchange it next turn with a more expensive card. Makes no sense to me.
I was looking for videos about this game again, and stumbled upon this video, very pleased to find out that I disliked this video. I'm sorry man but the whole point of the game is having to figure out how to get the cards you want. And yes sometimes you take the first card just to get the gems. In that case, you don't care too much about the card. But now taking the least expensive one is one of the best moves, because you almost always get gems, and you get a card to trade with.
I played this game many times, and almost never lost. And I think I have a good grasp on how this game works. Get rid of this house rule. It's not teaching you anything about the game.
Nah....that new rule removes all the fun.
I think this rule is awful and completely alters the game for bad. I think it would be better if you could discard one or more non-initial initial cards, either out of the game or to the bottom of the deck, to place yellow gems equal to the cards discarded, on cards on the market as if you were using regular gems on your cart to buy a card far on the line. You could still place from your cart as normal.
In lui of the many points I've read in the comments that I agree with, I would recommend an alternate to just the swap.
I would say allowing someone to pay cards instead of gems, (by placing them underneath the current card,) as well as a 1:1 card swap (for as many cards as picked up), to prevent new cards from populating. This would prevent too much manipulation of the card flow, still provide some alternative to giving up too many gems, allow some sense of control as to which cards you're willing to stack, and could still come a steep enough cost to prevent a constant string of sudden unbalancings in repeat playthoughs. However, this currently an untested mechanic idea, and would need playtesting to be narrowed down to efficiency.
Yes this swap rule is great! :) ty the suggestion! :)
Who ivents such a rule? Someone who is really bad in this game maybe? :p
This is one of the worst house rules I've ever seen.
Thanks for that, you are cute and all but… It seems you got this rule by refusing to accept you lost a game because of how it is played normally, lol.
that's interesting.. I'm going to try this out
This house rule is stupid wtf
Usually I dont like house rules and I think the designers/publishers had made a lot of playtests to see whats works and whats dont. But, for the very first time I see that this specific rule can add more potencial to the game. Maybe, and just maybe, I see a problem with take a card only to take the gem (or the spice, in the original version) in that and, next turn, trade that card again. So, I not sure if it will works, but I will give a try.
Said that, I really like yuor propose in the channel (I saw the thread in Reedit and went here).
Thanks Anderson! Let me know what you think after you give it a try.
that is the absaloulute worst rule ever😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬
Its amazing how everyone piles on with 'this breaks the game' yet I know no one has tried it. If you had tried it you would understand how this effects the economy of cards. The more cards you have in your engine the more efficient you will be. With this rule you are giving up a card that you likely will never play for a card that will (fun!), but it won't increase your card economy so you haven't gained as much as someone who could buy the card with gems (people will still use gems!). So if you are doing well there is no reason for you to use this rule because you will likely want all of your cards.
With that being said, I think there does need to be an additional price to swapping cards. You are introducing a way in two turns to get 'hard to get cards'. That isn't quite an equal exchange. The efficiency of everyone's engine is going to go way up, two cards for one may be more fair, or possibly additional gems, coins, or point card.