Has anyone ever tried a four player game?

As Maurya, Dravidia, Kush and Indus are very close together
they fullfill the 2 neighbor rule.

My only concern is that, using only 4 players, only a small
amount of trade cards will be in play. I am thinking about
changing something in card drawing. Maybe also the
Imperial Variant out of the optional rule book would be
possible.

But back to the main question:
Any ideas for a game of four players, with just 55 tokens
each on an area for just 4 players?

Personally I prefer not to play with a total of only 4 people. I only do this to introduce new players in a short game, just to explain a little and play a few rounds.

I don't even prefer playing with a total of five players as well, but opinions vary on that. I prefer at least a total of six players.

(when we are with 4, I'd rather play another boardgame)


There are many variants. You can look at the optional rulebook, and at the variants section of this forum.

One variant used by playing 2 or 3 players is to draw two trade cards per stack per city instead of one. This unbalances the game a bit, but I have never tried it with 4.

Other options indeed include playing with double nations.

There's a few discussion threads about this in the CEP: Variants and C & AC: Variants forums.

When I used to play the computer game, the AI opponents were terrible, so we would each play two or three nations separately, but would only count the worst at the end for score (to prevent someone from sacrificing one of theirs to boost the other). However, the computer version had a turn-based trading scheme, so you'd have to work out how the trading would work. I suggest coming up with a system, trying it out, and reporting back (in the variants forum).

I'd love to hear what happens.

Last summer I and three others tried a 4 players game with the full rules, and indeed we "suffered" the shortage of commodity cards. But also some calamities lost some game balancing effect: When an Epidemic is traded, there is no choice but to give the two other nations the full value of ten units to be lost.

My idea should be of having only one set of commodity cards in each stack, and still keeping all Major Calamities in the stacks.

That sounds like a good idea, much easier to get sets this way.

DG.