Last game we only had 9 players. My son desperately wanted to play the whole map (for 18 players) and we finally gave into him, expecting it to be a total disaster.

The modifications to the rules we made were:
1. Each player had 110 tokens, 8 ships and 18 Cities.
2. Calamity Cards carried double damage - e.g. Epidemic inflicted 50 points of damage to the Primary Victim, while Medicine and Anatomy allowed up to 16 units less damage. Barbarian Hordes consisted of 30 tokens! etc.
3. Civilization Advance Cards cost the same amount - not double.
4. Trade cards were combined into one stack
5. Allocation of trade cards was as follows. For cities 1 - 9 cards were taken from trade stacks 1 to 9. For cities 10 - 18 cards were taken from trade stacks 1 - 9 again.
i.e. A player with 10 cities received trade cards from stacks 1 to 9 plus another card from stack 1 (10 = 9 + 1).
A player with 15 cities received trade cards from stacks 1 to 9 plus 1 card from stacks 1 to 6 (15 = 9 + 6).

Much to our surprise the game worked really well. It allowed the use of the whole Map and the game took about the same length of time as our usual game - about 10 hours (with meal breaks).

One positive change was that the high level 8 & 9 Calamities were played more frequently, which gave an added twist to the game.

It is something that we will definitely do again.

Playing with Double Empires is our preferred way of playing.

We play with the player playing a mega nation - not two separate nations as Zorro mentions in his post on "Two Nations"

I appreciate that it will not be everyone's "cup of tea" - but if you want a game that:

- takes about 9 - 10 hours to finish

- allows you to buy and play the majority of the Special Abilities Cards

- allows you to end up with 300 - 400 points of value to spend after trading

- allows you to end up with 25 -35 Civilization Advance Cards (including most of the cards valued over 200) by the end of the game

- allows you to try and buy and use some of those Civilization Cards you struggle to afford

- allows you to use all of the map

then

why not give it a try?



This involves some subtle rule changes and to help us I have made some Colour Rules Charts. (see sample below - prints out on just under 4 pages)

They can be found, examined and downloaded at my webpage:


http://au.geocities.com/trad2bay/index.html