I’ve been thinking for a while now of repackaging the TGC edition of Jump Gate. I’ve been updating the graphics with an eye to getting everything to fit into TGC’s new Small Pro Box (which is their best packaging option at this point, hands down).
But with the new edition, there are a number of other things I am thinking of tweaking in the game. Here’s a quick list — and I’m looking for feedback and thoughts on these changes …
- No 6th Player – I’m planning for the third edition to be for 2 to 5 players. A 6-player game in the 1st and 2nd editions of the game has proven to be overly tight … it’s over very quickly and you really have not time to make or recover from a mistake.
- No Special Actions (replaced with wildcards) – Instead of having special actions listed on some NavComp cards, I’m including some cases of wildcard values instead (just like Schmidt Spiele did with Space Mission). That accomplishes nearly the same thing as most of the special actions much more efficiently.
- “Nothing” Resource Replaced with “Sand” – The “Nothing” cards were originally included to make it so that you didn’t exactly know how valuable each planet was going to be. Instead, I’m converting that into “Sand” (draft card pictured above) which is very low valued, unless you have the majority of what’s available … then it can be a bonus.
- Tweak to How “Scan” Works – I rather like the way scanning works in Space Mission, where you mark a single resource to be received later when the planet is claimed. So, to integrate it into Jump Gate‘s fully open resource information, a hybrid approach would work like this: Flip over 1 card of the still-hidden resources … this will give you 2 unmarked resources to choose between … mark one of them with your marker. When the planet is claimed, you will get that resource.
- New End-of-Game Timer – The current way that Jump Gate ends is either having enough Black Hole resource cards collected by the players, or having only Black Hole resources being what *hasn’t* been collected. This can lead to a never-ending game if players refuse to collect 1 last non-Black Hole resource card (annoying, but I’ve heard of it happening). So, I look to another thing in Space Mission for a possible answer. I plan to use the new “Sand” resource cards to drive a new timer (yes, a “Sand Timer” … sorry). Once a certain number of Sand cards have been *revealed* (not collected — just revealed), there will be one more round of turns and the game will end.
Okay … so, is that too much? Just right? Something else that needs to be tweaked as long as I’m poking at things?
Let me know your thoughts. You can comment below, or e-mail me, or comment via Twitter or Facebook. Thanks! 🙂
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