Interesting.  I haven’t seen this huge problem arise in the games I’ve played.  True, players do want to jostle for position at the turn of every Age so they can be lined up for first pickings in the next Age, but that’s part of the game.  (Note, that your simulated die-roll example works for discussion of going first in the initial round, but not for any subsequent round - like the 3rd Age when victory point upgrades become available - as players can vie for going first, just like in popular games like Caylus...)

The style of the game definitely encourages multiple plays, as knowing when to jostle for 1st place position is important.  When I can, I try to get an early position at the end of Age 2 in order to buy a good building in Age 3.

Many people like the game Puerto Rico, despite the 10-point buildings at the end of the game that can only go one to a customer.  If you really hate the victory point buildings in Age of Discovery, perhaps you should make them available in Age 2?  Some might need to be balanced for purchase earlier (like the income one) but the others would then be available before people might want to buy them (due to having better things to do with their money...) Thus, you get the self-leveling of Puerto Rico where the buildings are important, but everyone plays chicken over buying them as they don’t want to blow all their money too soon.

As the game stands, at the turn of Age 3, most people have enough money to buy Age 3 upgrades.  Thus there is a fight for turn order among those who have a high interest in getting specific upgrades.  (Those going last this round might be better served bowing out and going first the next round to get first crack at the fresh batch of upgrades...)

In any case, I feel the age upgrades are fairly well balanced - letting any one player run away with a particular strategy is obviously not optimal (this is different from Puerto Rico where a player pursuing a solo strategy tends to lose due to a lack of cooperative choices by the other players.) Yes, some of the upgrades may be slightly powerful than others, but that could then be taken into account when planning an overall strategy.

I will not argue that AoD is completely without luck (after all, some upgrades don’t even make it into the game, and if one’s plans included that particular upgrade, it can be a severe handicap.) However, it has enough strategy, variety, and ways to hedge one’s bets that it makes a fine, entertaining game.

Frank, I’m not familiar with the game, but might a balancing factor be to give the first player the most restrictive bonus card, and so on in reverse order? Or would that give too much information to the other players?

Brian’s suggestion might work, as it is really kind of easy to work out who is going for what. I suspect that the Presence card is just a wee bit too powerful by itself.

Matt: Age of Discovery <> Age of Empires III. (Admitedly, I had to go back and check that I hadn’t just written bad things about the wrong game. )

Silly Mistake, but it obviously does means that to sell a game this year you need to include the word “Age”, and that it should include Vikings.

haha I also at first thought it was about AoEIII, as it is, I can’t tell whether Matt is talking about the same game or not.

I’ve only played AoD twice and my initial impression was similar to yours, but on the second game I was not totally convinced. We looked at the bonuses people actually scored from their secret mission cards, and the numbers didn’t come up as being all that different. Now, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a significant advantage from one bonus or the other in terms of points they can score on the expeditions, but it’s a data point.

I think that the “get one guy on each mission” and the “get EVERYONE on each mission” are not too badly out of whack. The “one ship” one rewards buying small ships, which are hard to turn into trade missions and so makes it hard make that critical income (money is very tight) and hard to jack up your already subprime multiplier. The “all ships” lets you buy the big ships, which makes scoring trade missions much easier, gives you cash flow, and which makes jacking up your large multiplier even further easier. The two in-between cards are tough, though. You need a mix of ships which means you may not be particularly good at anything.

A lot of giving the roles the best shot to balance is making sure you complete plenty of trade missions for the folks who have the more difficult roles, both to give you a cash edge and to make sure you’re taking advantage of potentially large multipliers.

As for the turn thing, the different goals give the players different desires in terms of game pacing. You can accelerate or slow down the game buy buying few or many ships. I haven’t figured out who wants a shorter game and who wants a longer game, though (same thing with the explorations ... I’m pretty sure some goals give you an incentive to mismatch colors and some don’t, but I’m not sure which is which).

Having just said all this, I’m not convinced the roles are at all balanced. I think the outside two roles (monopoly and presence) have an advantage. But my impression of the imbalance was less after the second game, and the game had enough inherently interesting stuff going on I’d like to give it another go to see if the perceived imbalance continues to go down.

Chris: The big difference in AoD to me is not the type of ships you buy, but which expeditions you send them on.

The Presence player clearly wants to place a ship on each high-point value expedition. He will get max points from the larger expeditions.

The other players have to be concerned with going into the high-value expeditions because there will be more competition because they can accept more ships. So the chance of losing one of these is significantly higher.

Which is a nice little choice to hide in such a short game. The Presence player, however, totally gets a free ride.

Pfft… well all that nice writing down the tubes… (well, maybe it was nice, I’m a bit biased I guess...)

Forgive me for my misunderstanding… AoEIII is actually called “Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery” don’t know how I could have made a mistake there.... ;)

For some reason I thought you were using “Age of Discovery” as a shortened form of the game name to distinguish it from Age of Mythology or some sort of thing…

That said, who makes AoD?  And why am I so addicted to using ellipses...?

Throw in some double dashes, and nest your parentheses (LISP programmer, here) and we might have the same writing style.

AoD is Mayfair/Phalanx. Tiny little box, lots of cards.