I recently watched some videos on this game and I absolutely love the art style and gameplay. However my normal group is 3 to 4 people, I’m wondering if anyone has any good alternate rules to accommodate additional players. I’ve done some googling and there are some ideas out there, but nothing really solid as far as I can tell.
I had a few friends over for a games day on Saturday.
When choosing the next game, I floated the idea that we could play 4 player Radlands by going in 2x teams of 2 people.
…no one went for it :P
(subnote: It may work as 2vs2, but this was after 11 hours of Judge Dredd Wildlands, Inis, Heat-Pedal to the Metal, and Cyclades combining to cause minor brain fog.)
I’ve read that you can do this with 2 camps each. You sit across from your teammate and you can only target the opponent on your left. That way your partner has to defend your flank while you defend theirs. The first team to destroy a single opponent’s 2 camps wins.
Is this how you would have played? Any other alternate rules?
I thought of playing a regular side-by-side coop game with 2 people per 3 base team, as it had been a long day of individual competitive games.
The way you describe gives much more scope for weighing up the attack/defend or protect-your-partner decisions, I’ll give it a try.
Let me know how it goes! First turn water allocations for this method are 1, 2, 2, 3, and then 3 for all proceeding turns.
Awesome, thanks for the water stepping. Looking forward to it.
I’ve played it two players. It’s great. Would also love a 3-4 player version!
I’ve seen a few different ways discussed but this one seems like the best (I don’t have the game to test it out).
- Each player starts with 2 Camps, +1 for each opponent. (So 3 players is 4 camps each, 4 players is 5 camps each)
- Players can damage any opponent.
- Events effect each opponent
- Players cannot Summon People or Punks in a column with a destroyed camp. (This is to balance out the additional camps)
- People and Punks already in the column after a camp is destroyed remain in their slot until destroyed.
Pulling from a different alternate ruleset I found online that was suggesting 2v2:
- First turn water allocation for 4 players goes 1, 2, 2, and 3. On turn 2 everyone gets 3. (3 players is 1, 2, 3, and then 3 for everyone)
Radlands final turns can be so tight, I suspect variant rule is impossible, and alternative rules would be very different (and interesting).
Full alternative rules needs a lot of work as the components are already specified and you have to find interesting mechanism with them. While in board game design, components are shaped to match the mechanism. Very few games had such rules : Traditional game cards and Chess are the firsts who comes in mind, but I suspect War of the Ring also had such alternative rules.
