Looks like it. I played 4 games of this a while back with four other players (no Usurper). We thought it felt a bit imbalanced, but it's probably because we were playing it for the first time and were thinking about the priorities and goals of the roles as we went. That article said the role of the Bandits was difficult, but it seems the Assassin seems to have a difficult job, too, as they want players to lose in a roughly particular order.
The last game that evening was pretty fun, and had better politics and suspense at least through midgame. I was playing Daxos and was a Bandit. The other Bandit and I found each other by midgame while the Knight was stuck unable to help the King and the Assassin got hated out early because they were playing Purphoros. The other Bandit got knocked out, and I almost killed the King on my own. But his Zegana deck was just more effective then mine even though we both had our engines going. Also, he still had Prophet of Kruphix because he hadn't played or updated decks in months.
I think it's a fun variant, though. More nuanced than Secret Partners.
The Usurper is blatantly worse than any other role. Anyone who thinks otherwise is buying into the theatrics of the role names and not paying attention to the actual mechanics.
The Assassin is also significantly worse than the Barbarians, since you need to kill everyone and do not have an ally in doing so.
It sucks, and I hate whenever my local play group insists on this format. Note that there are better versions out there that actually gives special abilities to each role commensurate to the disadvantage they play with or else something thematic to the role (e.g.: the King can give a small boon to someone other than himself once per turn to try to make friends, the assassin can reveal himself/herself once per game to super-ultra-exile one creature and then gets deathtouch on his/her creatures for the rest of the game to account for the fact that everyone is now after the assassin. Etc.)
But that also complicates things even further so my group will have nothing to do with it.
Is the rules described in this article the same as the Kingdoms format people were talking about a while back? i.e., 6 people, the roles, etc.
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The last game that evening was pretty fun, and had better politics and suspense at least through midgame. I was playing Daxos and was a Bandit. The other Bandit and I found each other by midgame while the Knight was stuck unable to help the King and the Assassin got hated out early because they were playing Purphoros. The other Bandit got knocked out, and I almost killed the King on my own. But his Zegana deck was just more effective then mine even though we both had our engines going. Also, he still had Prophet of Kruphix because he hadn't played or updated decks in months.
I think it's a fun variant, though. More nuanced than Secret Partners.
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The Assassin is also significantly worse than the Barbarians, since you need to kill everyone and do not have an ally in doing so.
It sucks, and I hate whenever my local play group insists on this format. Note that there are better versions out there that actually gives special abilities to each role commensurate to the disadvantage they play with or else something thematic to the role (e.g.: the King can give a small boon to someone other than himself once per turn to try to make friends, the assassin can reveal himself/herself once per game to super-ultra-exile one creature and then gets deathtouch on his/her creatures for the rest of the game to account for the fact that everyone is now after the assassin. Etc.)
But that also complicates things even further so my group will have nothing to do with it.
- Rabid Wombat