Player 1 Yellow

Blow your game up! (Inspired by playing in designer Admiral Siadek’s Giant BS games at GenCon & Origins).

I scanned the ship module tiles into my pc, then re-printed at a slight;y larger scale (each square right about 1″). We use 28mm miniatures for characters & aliens (D&D minis, Star Wars minis – all can be found pretty cheap, often only $0.35 each for Commons). The ships are still a reasonable footprint (usually taping a ship onto a piece of poster board or foam board). If your players are RPGers OR gamers, they will love moving their minis around as they race about their ship (or board the enemy)!

We still use the smaller Space Map to show ship movement, using some cool miniature sci-fi ship models (I’m running a Firefly variant right now. Their ship is an actual Serenity model from the Firefly boardgame).

With younger or less-skilled flicking players, I allow plenty of “mulligans” (esp if they mis-hit and their disk barely moves). They’ll mess up enough with legitimate shots, so why frustrate them (or make them hate the game) if they get punished for sloppy fingers.

Now the Catacomb Lord? No mercy. If he whiffs, he whiffs. (In our games, the CL is typically one of our better players anyway).

We don’t allow players to touch the board to count spaces. It’s frustrating when you are using your eyes and counting in your head to plan ahead, then Player 2 reaches out to touch every space, counting to 20, blocking your view. Strongly recommend a No Board Touch rule!

We use a few “markers” to help avoid missiing some things:

* Neutral/wood cubes on a city where a Hotel card has been revealed. When a Player takes the card, we replace with their color (Monopoly hotels!)

* When a Service Bounty card appears, we put a d6 on that city with the top value = the Bonus Points. Remove when claimed.

* We also have a cool little Hot Wheels Locomotive that gets passed around as the 1st Player Token. We require the new recipient to belt out an appropriate “Choo-Choo” or equivalent when they receive it.

As Joe Chuck suggests below, we use glass beads for the ships. They slide better and navigate the board seam/crack “wobbles” gracefully. I didn’t apply stickers as I have a box full of beads and found enough in the 4 player colors to sub out all of the ships. We still use the wooden battleships, tho.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration. But MoV is a looong game. It’s a great game, but a long one. In an effort to encourage quicker rounds, I use a dice tray. When a player has completed all of their Movement Phase, they pass the tray left. While the previous player moves into their Transaction Phase, the next player can roll their dice and begin their own turn.

There is so little (if any) direct interaction between players, there shouldn’t be any harm in this. In fact, I’m going to fancify mine with 4 dice in each player color to help this process even further!

In a 4-player game,it worked well. The person doing their Transaction Phase has the player to their right help them (moving tokens/tiles, banking, etc). The player rolling has player to their left helping them
(with Encounter Cards, tiles, rules, etc).

When teaching this great game to new players, consider:

* With “Gamers” (just new to RotW/RRT) – Play w/o Event Deck, the randomness can detract from the planning & puzzle-sense they need to learn first. Also, just deal one (or none) Barons. (Eliminates “choice”, which can frustrate players who don’t yet know the relative difficulty of each Baron. (I point out to them that the Baron Card is not critical, sometimes it’s worth it to abandon the Baron’s Objective, you may get more points in other ways, anyway!)

* Non-Gamers – Don’t use Event Deck (as above). Don’t use Baron Cards.

Some believe the Operations Deck is too confusing to new players, too, but I think it’s too integral a part of the full game to omit. YMMV.

The game should still win them over and they’ll be eager to play again. Then you can ease those elements back in!

I often teach this game to new players (usually to teens on my soccer teams). To ease up the game, I borrow (but tweak) the popular No Traitor Rule. I don’t tell them that. I’ll show them 1 more card than the number of players, announcing that there MIGHT be a Traitor, altho I know there won’t be . This helps them succeed, having no player sabotaging. It also keeps any new player from having to figure out how to traitor/manipulate rules he doesn’t even know yet (sometimes spoiling a game for a newcomer). But it also teaches all of them to pay attention and to analyze what (and WHY) other players make the decisions they did during gameplay (added benefit = they learn the game quicker)!

* We seldom use the Pig, house-ruling him out.
* We always use the Builder, one of the best Carc exp rules!
* We’ll vote on using Trade goods or not. If we’re all experienced, we vote it in (we like the incentive to finish other players’ things, as someone else mentioned earlier)! If we are teaching many new players, we leave it out (unnecessary complicated layers to the basic rules).

It was a few games before someone mentioned this to me (I had been thinking I was just REALLY unlucky)! Remember that in Age III, the grey and brown resources are now gone! So get what you need by end of Age II. Also, if you’re teaching newcomers, it’d be nice if you mention this.

We don’t use the numbers. Maybe we have too many AP-prone players, but it speeds the game considerably. (In our defense, we play with kids alot and worry the memory aspect gives adults an unfair advantage)

For scoring, every Survivor = 1 pt.

Seems obvious (tho does take valuable time):

Strategically build your Research Stations (about 1 per major color area) to allow for long-term quick movement of your team around the globe as you eliminate each color threat.

If you are using my Not-Very-Popular Stay Together strategy, this will be essential to get your team to the next trouble area with speed!

Rule #1 of the Dungeon! Well, okay… but it can work here, too!

We’ve had pretty good success (about a 2:1 W:L ratio, tho that took awhile, more Ws recently than early on) by “concentrating our fire”. Stick together and hit one color hard. Yes, others will seem to spiral out of control, but if you pay attention (as others have mentioned) to the Discard Pile, you can nip at nearby other colors while still staying fairly close together for easier card swapping, curing, etc.

Dividing your efforts can make swapping cards impossible, plus one agent alone may not make much headway vs any one disease, esp if Epidemic Cards arrive “early” each phase!

Ar-M had a good point (below) and it’s how I approach the game, esp with large number of players. Players have a tendency to want to “break free of the pack” with big Move 3s & 2s right away. But everyone else is doing the same!
Big move cards = long pushes = trouble (for THEM)!

So, start with slower moves, let the others jump ahead, nail them with a few laser blasts, and watch them push each other off course & into hazards. Then weave thru the wrreckage at a comfortable speed.

Danger! If the runaway leaders do enough damage to each other right away, bots could appear behind you quickly, so be prepared to veer off the Main Route and get out of their line of fire!
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Also agree with Rob H’s suggestion to not limit lives. Keep everyone in the game = more mayhem!

When using EE to introduce new players to crayon railroading, we alter the set-up a bit. Now, mind you, the vast majority of people I have taught it to were already “gamers” to some degree, just new to crayon rail games.

1) Teaching non-gamers or kids: use the set-up & start rules in the book (starting delivery cards and initial track build set up based on color).

2) Teaching Gamers: ignore the “initial set-up” rules. Let players start wherever they want to build their 1st track. Random draw of delivery cards. Helps invest them in their starting decisions. They won’t feel hand-held.

Whenever you can, keep a unit or two in the hexes with the flank lines drawn through them! Then they can be activated by either Section orders.

Others have mentioned this, too, but i’ll echo how important it is to plan ahead! If you are down to only one Left Section card, but have a few good Center Section cards, then get those troops in the Left Section onto (or across) that line! (Granted, terrain & enemy position can foil that plan, but it’s often well worth the try).

Every T2R board has Key Cities. These are cities that either serve as a major hub or crossroads geographically, or that appear a little more often than others on that game’s Destination Tickets (the two are usually related).

Choose your opening routes to allow yourself to cross thru 3-5 of those Key Cities and finish a long, continuous path (helping win the Bonus Pts, too, if your game is using that card/rule). Then, if you’ve “played your cards right” (snicker), you’ll be in a position, with plenty of time/turns left, to draw aLOT more Destination Tickets (maybe baffling your opponents).

It is very likely that with each draw you will have already completed at least one of those routes = free points! Even if you have to “swallow” a loss of points once/twice, you’ll more than make up the difference in longer, already connected, routes!

Figuring out what the Key Cities on each map isn’t difficult, just takes some observation and repeated play. And, HEY! That’s what we’re all here for, right?

There has been alot of debate on how “water hex” can/should be interpreted (if you haven’t played yet, it’s more expensive to build track in a “water hex”)

I like the Simple River Rule: you only pay the higher cost if your track construction would require a bridge, literally CROSSING a river (blue lines on the map). This rule ignores the “partial water” coastal hexes plus allows track to be built cheaper along/parallelling a river’s course.

Some argue that building along a coast or along a riverbed WOULD be more hazardous/costly due to weaker soil conditions (sand, silt, etc) and fluctuating water edge position (depending on season, floods, etc). Almost everyone I play with have no problem with that idea, we just prefer the simpler, No Arguments method.

YMMV.

A popular Auction variant that we tried (& liked) has become our standard procedure on all the maps.

Everyone bids as normal for Turn Order. The 1st person to “pass” goes to the Lowest Available/Remaining spot in Turn Order. This process continues until all Turn Order slots are filled. The players who place 1st & 2nd have to pay their last bid price to bank.

We use Rory’s Story (& Action) Cubes in our RPGs (even DnD).
We do alot of storytelling (often via flashback scenes), where the players are given alot of freedom in crafting their (& others’) stories. Some of our players are roll-players or kids, who aren’t accustomed to such storytelling. So, when any of them get “stuck” we let them toss the Story Dice and use the results to jump-start their imaginations! Works especially well for the kids in the group. It lets that type of player satisfy their dice-rolling urges, too! Cool find, glad to have stumbled upon Rory’s Cubes!

The Event Deck adds some thematic elements to the game.
You can also customize the deck for your group’s tastes. Stack it in favor of beneficial events for a game with alot of newcomers, or stack with bad events to keep a table of veterans off-balance!