F&^# Broken Games - How to fix Thebes

I don't fix games, I don't even like house rules. I play the game as the designer intended, and if the game sucks, I play something else. Furthermore, in my experience when someone makes a suggestion on how to alter a game, all the other chiefs at the table need to pipe up on what they think should be done instead of or in addition too, etc, etc.

But I'll take a stab at Thebes for your entertainment and give you the chance to offer your own suggestions.

In my opinion, the game is fine right up until you go to draw from the bag. As you may remember, you first figure out how much research you have done and decide how much time you are going to spend digging. Then you consult a chart! You draw some random tiles. You keep the good ones and put the crap back into the bag. The tiles have different values (and they are different depending on what bag you draw from as well), with more than half the tiles being blank. So this is the part that needs to be addressed.

We want to reward two things:

1) amount of research collected

2) amount of time spent digging

Rather than a chart, I'll just reward each separately.

First rewarding the amount of research collected. I would give victory points equal to the amount of research collected divided by two (rounding up). Further, I'll require you dig for at least one week per VP awarded. Since you can only dig in each place once per year, this shouldn't be abusable.

Second, we'll use the bags to award VPs for the amount of time spent digging. The bags are trying to model two things. One that there is less to find in subsequent digs, and two that you use your research to find things. So we'll accomplish the same thing by giving you one draw per week spent. The maximum number of weeks you can dig is equal to your research.

Bags will now be filled with just 20 tiles. 10 tiles are worth one VP, and 10 tiles are blank. You keep the VPs you draw and put the blank tiles back in. If you go to dig in palestine with 10 points in research, and decide to dig for 10 weeks, you get 5 VPs for the amount of research you have, and you get 10 draws from the bag. You should end up with 8-12 VPs total.

All other arbitrary point awards should be balanced around this mechanic. It's better to keep this part simple than try and balance this with the existing points.

Sorry Ryan, no Nazis :(