Thread:Wazat/@comment-27613051-20161214021819/@comment-454133-20161219201918

Depends on whether you're doing elimination or point scoring.

Free For All Elimination benefits the coward who hangs back and lets his foes fight each other. It works fine in 2 player games, but add a third player and suddenly there's a huge incentive to sit back and hope your opponents do the work for you.

There's also points-scoring games like Furballs (each player has one ship within a sharp point limit, and you score victory points with hits and grow your squad points at the same time). These benefit strong attackers with high agility, since you can score the most points while giving away as few points as possible. You can adjust the points rewarded to also add some kind of penalty to death, so it's not entirely hits-based (otherwise the glass cannons have the most fun). I find Furballs to be a delightful format, very fast and tactical, but it discourages low-agility ships. You wouldn't bring a Ghost or Decimator, for example, since you'd end up just giving points away. I've found TIE Defenders tend to rule this game unless the players gang up on them. It's just too easy to exploit the lack of a common goal or strategy among your enemies, and the defender is really good at not giving away points.

Then there's the goal-based games.... I'd like to do more of these. These are neat because they can be asymmetrical -- each player has an entirely different goal and/or strategy. For a simple example, the Empire wants to kill off the Rebel ships, the Scum hates the Empire's repression and wants to kill them, and the Rebels want to kill off the Scum pirates that are targeting civilians. This would be a simple triangle, but we can add complexity: the Empire wants to eliminate the Rebels down to the last ship; the Scum want to destroy the Empire's Huge Flagship, and the Rebels want to use missiles and bombs to destroy the Scum base. They could also have reversed secondary goals, e.g. the rebels get points for each damage they deal to the Empire ship. Add the Millennium Falcon to the Scum side, and he can switch over to the rebels for a much higher reward at the end of the game if they win, but if the rebels lose and he switched to their side, he loses everything.

Another more assymetrical game is the Empire is trying to destroy the rebel power generators (4 of these, which have 6 shield, 6 hull, and regain 1 shield per round), the rebels are trying to defend them (without concern of how many ships either side kills -- dead ships come back). The scum in the mean time are trying to make deliveries to or otherwise assist both sides, and can take on jobs from either side to help the war effort or hinder it (possibly choosing jobs from randomly drawn cards on each side). Every scum ship comes into play with either A Score To Settle or A Debt To Pay, paired with a random ship on the other side. Either faction can attack the scum if it's not behaving as desired, and the scum could attack either side to clear a path or complete a mission etc. You could even allow players to place free-form bounties for the scum to attack certain targets, but the reward they give the scum is some of their victory points. The game ends after 8 rounds.

The goal-based games can be pretty hard to balance, but when you're doing a story, you don't necessarily care about being balanced. It's actually fine to have one player in the role of underdog. And it works well for a multi-game campaign where the factions gradually grow with time, and the scum possibly switches sides or plays both sides from game to game.

....now I want to play a 3-player scenario. Needs some fleshing out, but it sounds fun now that I've written it down. ^_^