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How do you DUNE?
There are a lot of optional and advanced rules.
Some seem tied together like more spice blows / spice cost for attacks.
Anyway, I am curious...how do you play? Keep it simple? House-rules?
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Short answer: I use all the optional rules, none of the advanced rules, and none of the expansions.
My original gaming group used all of the rules in the base game, but considered the later expansions (duel, spice harvest) to be abominations. Another group that I played with used everything in the French edition, but their misunderstanding of the duel cards broke the game.
I've read the books, though I'm not obsessed with them. Because of that I dismiss the spice cost for attacks as an unthematic and unwelcome complication to the combat rules. Spice in the books was an extremely valuable commodity, useful for interstellar navigation, enhancing psionic ability, and prolonging lifespan. You wouldn't feed it to army. It also unbalances the factions significantly, making the game easier for the money-making factions, like the Guild and the Emperor.
The rules for a second spice blow each turn seem to exist only to support the spice cost for attacks. I don't like them because they shorten the lifespan of alliances, which makes the decision to enter into an alliance somewhat more trivial than it should be.
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- hotseatgames
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- Erik Twice
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All optional rules (Additional powers)
No Advanced Rules (Two spice-blows per turn): This wrecks the game's balance.
No expansions (Neither is well-regarded)
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Alliances between two players only. This is, by far, the most important rule to follow.
When you give another player spice as part of a deal, they don't get it until the next turn (This keeps the Emperor's power from being useless and prevents abuse)
Rex is FFG's attempt to modernize Dune by condensing the game to be shorter and removing much of the harshness. They are the same game, in the same sense a Hitchcock film and its modern remake are. If you liked Rex,well, try Dune because the difference in quality is staggering. I didn't think there would be much of a difference, but after playing Dune I thought every single change in Rex was for the worse, often game-breakingly so.hotseatgames wrote: I have never had the opportunity to play Dune. I did play REX once, and really liked it. How different are they?
Basically, Rex has twice the spice (influence) than Dune did and ends in half the number of turns. Troops walk faster and the board is smaller, with less territories and less of a distance between strongholds. Think about any game you like and imagine how it would be to play if you had twice the troops and twice the resources available from the start, that's what happened with Rex. It's a far more aggressive, battle-driven game with higher bids and hence less of a focus on treachery and negotiation.
Going back to the movie example, it's like someone thought a film was too slow and decided that all the slow, tension-filled scenes should be removed to make room for action setpieces.
Either way, this change has massive, far-reaching effects. First, since the game was now much shorter, the revivals had to be massively increased. In Dune, factions could revive 1 or 2 troops per turn and leaders only came back when you exhausted every other leader you had. In Rex you can revive them every turn if needed. This turns a tense, difficult game into one that is much easier, and forgiving and hence less interesting.
These changes also tip the competitive balance of the game, to the point that many players who liked Rex at first ended abandoning it because of a lack of balance. Here's the issue: Since there's more combat and more shipping The Guild becomes significantly more powerful than it was in Dune, to the point it's clearly the best faction. Even better, they win if nobody else does by the game's end and since the game now ends much sooner it's much easier for them to win. And all these changes hurt the other factions.
FFG also tried to remove some of the harshness of the original game, which made the game significantly less interesting. The auction is a good example.
The interesting bit about the auction in Dune is that you don't know which cards to bid on and they are not all good. In fact, some of them are literally "useless" and do nothing but take space in your hand. In Rex, all cards are useful so players can't "bid wrong". This is less harsh, sure, but also defeats the point of the mechanic.
I'll be honest, I think Dune is one of the best games ever made, up there with Netrunner and Chess. Try to play it, specially if you liked Rex.
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www.starbasejeff.com/dune_rules.asp
Not sure if its a house rule or a clarification but if Fremen use Karama to ride a worm into a main city early in a turn, we let them use ornithopters that turn.
Edit: I wanted to add extra emphasis to keep karama cards. They seem ultra powerful and are, but taking them out will eliminate a huge strategic element of the game, and they usually play a big role in winning moves once you get a few games under your belt and know how to properly wield them.
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- Michael Barnes
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Ben
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- Disgustipater
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- Disgustipater
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- Michael Barnes
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Mostly we’ve just played as written, to be honest.
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Make sure everyone knows how horrible it is to lose lots of tokens in combat. Say this 3, 5, 10 times if you have to, you can't stress it enough for new players. It might seem exciting to commit a huge stack to a battle, but if you find most of your dudes in the Tanks it takes *F-O-R-E-V-E-R* to recover (especially with single spice blows and a tight economy). You don't want players basically sitting on the sidelines on CHOAM charity for multiple turns just making up the numbers at the table--they'll never want to play again!
Run away from battles or negotiate like hell unless you're pretty sure you can win.
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- Michael Barnes
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Still one of the best combat resolution mechanics of all time.
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- san il defanso
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I agree on limiting alliances to two people, and on using advanced rules and karama powers, but NOT double spice blow and advanced combat. JoelCFC25 is right on about the combat. Not many games reinforce the idea that war is an enormous outlay of resources, but Dune definitely does.
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