Interesting point of distinction for changing loyalties - why the bidding system for one scenario but not the other? for an 18-card game, would have thought that streamlining ruleset would be more important.. unless playtesting showed that it was unbalanced without bidding in one scenario but not other?
Yep, your last point was the case. In playtesting we found that switching loyalties was too powerful of a strategy and not penalizing enough. So we introduced at least the threat of the other player buying some of your cards out from under you in a change. Yeah normally you'd expect the shrunk version to be simpler but I don't think that's where this project ended up. It's definitely not like a gateway into Pamir...more like a travel version or "try before you buy" version :)
Interesting point of distinction for changing loyalties - why the bidding system for one scenario but not the other? for an 18-card game, would have thought that streamlining ruleset would be more important.. unless playtesting showed that it was unbalanced without bidding in one scenario but not other?
Yep, your last point was the case. In playtesting we found that switching loyalties was too powerful of a strategy and not penalizing enough. So we introduced at least the threat of the other player buying some of your cards out from under you in a change. Yeah normally you'd expect the shrunk version to be simpler but I don't think that's where this project ended up. It's definitely not like a gateway into Pamir...more like a travel version or "try before you buy" version :)