Several years ago, Matt and Robin Crawford designed a two player variant in which each person plays two nations. The highlights of this variant are :

Trade cards for each player's nations are combined into one hand. A maximum of 12 cards can be held at the end of the trading round.

Calamities are randomly assigned to one of the player's two nations.

For the purpose of victory determination, the lower of the player's two scores is counted.

Each nation acquires Civilization cards independently by turning in trade cards and treasury, i.e. a set of 9 salt worth 243 points cannot be shared between the two nations.

In my group we seldom have even six players. Often it is only four. In my opinion the game is much better with 5 or more. One time we tried the Crawford variant with three people playing six nations and found it to be better than a regular three player game.

We intend to try 4 players with 8 nations (while also building the parts for an Expansion Project set). The natural question to ask is whether 6-9 players could play the Expansion Project game with two nations each. The recommendation would be for each person to play one nation in the East and one in the West.

Game reports are welcome.