Greed is good

 The Flautist and I did another Terraforming Mars alternate rules test.  As I said last time, we decided to see what would happen if we dealt ourselves a bunch of the best trading themed cards from the Colonies expansion.  We took the best 10, dealt out 5 to each of us, and then 5 random cards.  We played the basic corporation so we would have to keep the cards and then played.

Our 5 colonies were cash, titanium, steel, heat, and oceans.  On turn 1 we had 5 colonies out, 3 on cash, 2 on titanium.  Turn 2 saw another colony on titanium, and turn 3 saw 2 more colonies, both on steel.  I played a trading enhancer and a couple ways to make trading cheaper, and The Flautist played 2 additional trade fleets and a way to make trading cheaper.  It was silly.  We had 19 cash, 6 titanium, and 10 steel coming in every turn between us, to say nothing of the extra income from the colonies themselves.  It wasn't just that though - I drew huge income cards and ended the game with 58 raw income and 49 terraform rating, for 107 cash incoming on turn 11... and that didn't even take into account my 5 titanium and 6 steel income.

We filled the entire board on turn 11 and then ended the game with both of us having exactly 38 dollars in front of us that we could not spend on anything.

This isn't a surprise of course.  The trading cards all multiply together, each one making the others more potent.  More than that though, the fact that one of us was in trading meant it was more profitable for the other one to dip into trading too.  I find the opposite usually occurs in large games, as much of the time nobody builds a trading empire at all.  It just isn't worth it unless you get a good combo of cards, and if nobody else joins you in building colonies the return on investment is paltry.

But when every player builds colonies as fast as they can, whoo baby the game goes crazy.

It was a fun experiment but clearly it warps the game completely.  If we hadn't gotten quite as strong a set of colonies the story might have gone differently but even if I was just producing a glorious stack of heat and power it still ends the game quickly.  I suppose it might have been a more normal looking game if a bunch of the colonies that don't enter play right away had been randomly chosen, but that wouldn't even have been much fun, or fit with the theme.

Much like Jovian cards, the trading cards need a critical mass to be good.  Below that point they aren't worth much, but above it they become the entire game.  That does give the game a lot of variety but it does mean that dealing them all out like this feels kind of silly.

I have another idea for our next rules experiment - reject draft.  Any time a player decides not to buy a card or discards a card for money the other player may choose to buy it for 3 bucks if they want to.  I hope this makes card choices much more interesting and lets us assemble cool combos.  I considered making it so that any card you discard can be bought by the other player at a discount - after all, it is a patent that seemingly has little value.  Market value depends on demand!  It would be tricky to figure out if you should buy a mediocre card for 3 if it would cost your opponent only 2 to purchase it.

Naturally this just increases the power level of the game, giving players more choices.  It isn't nearly as big a power level jump as the 'all the trading cards' game we just played though, so I expect the final board state to look a lot more normal.