Blanks and No X

One thing I'm discovering, both for myself, and from e-mails I'm getting, is that the Expansion is a little too easy. I think a big part of this comes from the fact that there are no roaming monsters for the X tiles explicitly. That means more often than not, you are safe in the X tiles when there are no treasure sites. That's not good, and makes the game easier than I intended. That will change in the next release, as I assemble some monsters to cover that portion of the board.

Also, the balance of treasure at some of the sites is a little... off. The generator site has something like 12 treasures, and when you find that, its easy pickings to get a load of new stuff, and get very powerful very fast. I need to adjust that a bit.

There has been some confusion about the "BLANK" chits. I have had some people think this was an error in the program, but truly these are intentional. The 10 BLANK chits are meant to mix up the board a bit, to provide a level of danger to the normally safe Valley tiles. In most cases, the Valley tiles will end up with either a GOLD or a BLANK, but there is a small chance that the Gate of Chaos will appear which brings a lot of chits at once. If you want to calculate the odds, you can see the setup in the original expansion rules.

That said, Roberto U had a wonderful suggestion: make these BLANK chits into something meaningful, if no effect. One example he gave was "HAMLET". The chit would still have no overall effect, but would have more flavor than just "BLANK". Oooh, hey I just thought of something. If I made each of the BLANK chits actual "places", then there would be something to reference in the Guild Quests (coming soon) for various tasks. For example, imagine a quest that reads "Travel to the Cherry Hamlet, and pick up a package. Deliver the package to Druid Grove where ...." anyway, you get the idea. Since the Guild Quests feature will come with a quest generator tool that you can use to make your own quests, this will open the door for all kinds of variety.