The main difference is that when stealing from your neighbors, any word you steal will cost them points. In addition, you get bonuses for long words and for using all of your letters.

However, there is a rule that states that on your turn you can only steal one word from one other player. This gives you incentives to steal long, valuable words from another player, especially if it contains the current "trump" suit (worth more points).

I quickly discovered a few useful rules of thumb when playing this game.

• Always use all of your letters. It's nearly always possible if you have time to think it through, especially if you follow the next rule. Also, the more letters you use, then the more points you will score, as the game has a finite length based on who finishes first.
• Make lots of short, crappy words. Even though making words of all the same suit will "lock" them (thereby preventing players from stealing them), in general, the other players won't want to steal a really small, less valuable words. In addition, by making lots of small words, it is easier to use all of your tiles, and the damage from having a word stolen is minimized.
• Punish your opponents for long words. If they only play a long word on their turn, steal it (thereby taking away a lot of their points) and turn it into a ton of small words, punishing them for making a long word.

I love competitive word games. But I, at least, have to remember that a lot of my friends who like to play word games like Word Thief are not hardcore gamers, so maybe I shouldn't be so competitive with them.

Photo — Lainey's Repertoire

Set aside this and another card from your hand. Return them to your deck at the end of the game.

In addition to giving the holder two victory points, this card offers a way to have other victory point cards count towards your final score without affecting the actual composition of your deck. It's an interesting change to the mechanics.

The addition of Islands to Dominion is relatively minor: after all, you can only pull a total of ten cards out of your deck in addition to the islands, and that's assuming that you purchase the whole stack. Just the same, I'm interested in seeing how it affects game play.

Dominion

For a quick fix to add players, we add in more victory points. This means that not only is it important to have twelve Province cards available, but we also add in the seven blank cards that come with the game as extra Provinces. It's a bit of a hack — but it works. Games still tend to go pretty quickly: you can imagine how fast those Provinces disappear, but it's not so fast that we don't have some fun in the process.

Race for the Galaxy

Our six player version is really just two games of three players each going concurrently at the same table. We've tried a couple of variations, including using just one set of cards for all six players. I eventually want to see some numbers on how things go down with different variations, but we haven't been tracking closely.

Other Options

When it comes to hacking a game for extra players, there is one important factor: the amount of interaction between individual players. If it is fairly minimal, as in Race for the Galaxy and Dominion, it is much simpler to find some way to expand a game without creating a huge imbalance.

We're open for discussion on this one: what games have you had good experiences expanding for extra players? Any specific approaches — up to and including playing in teams — that have worked?

It's a balancing game, and there are certain strategies that you learn fairly quickly. I'm still analyzing the game, but I have not had the chance to construct any computer models due to the large variety of cards and randomness in an individual hand.

One key idea most people pick up is that there is a delicate balance of cards you want. For instance, gold cards are one of the most expensive cards to buy (costing 6), and are worth 3 when spent. Copper, on the other hand, is free and only worth 1 when spent. But, gold really is worth more because it allows you to have a much higher total value in a 5-card hand, enabling you to buy better cards.

And this is where the above problem with victory point cards come in: They have no value during the game. So the more you buy, the more dud cards you have in your hand.

At first, most of us thought that this was crippling, and we often played the games in two separate phases: the "normal" game phase and the "everyone-go-crazy-buying-victory-points-phase".

However, it turns out that this is where the "cellar" card comes in handy: it allows you to discard cards in your hand for new cards from your deck. So, in theory, as long as you keep a healthy supply of cellars, then you can have a ton of victory point cards without hurting your deck too much.

After playing like this, I think it's a good strategy that allows you to purchase more victory points in the earlier game. This is especially important if "gardens" are in the variant you are playing. A garden is worth 1 victory point for every 10 cards in your deck. Often, when we've played with them, we will accumulate decks of over 100 cards. And furthermore, gardens are very cheap to purchase, changing the dynamic of the game significantly.

There are still a lot of questions I have about this game. The most important being, "What exactly breaks when you have more than 4 people (the maximum on the box)?" Since we have 6 in our normal gaming group, it's an important question, but I'd like to do some modeling to figure it out.

Happy holidays everyone.