1. One idea is that you never get the miner back.
I'm not keen on this.
2. Another idea to punish players for incompletely surrounded mines is to penalize the player -1 for each tile around his mine which is not complete.
I like this very much. Just need to change one word in the rules. (scores -> loses)
That will give the owning player some incentive to complete his gold mines towards the end of the game.
3. Another idea is to only give the player 1 point up till the mine is surrounded on 7 of the 8 sides. This makes it really hard to put the mine in a position that the opponents cannot completely surround it. it also is a punishment to the player for playing a mine as the opponent woudl never waste a tile to finish surrounding your mine because you woudl get the miner back at that time.
Not everybody has all the tiles memorized, so this might be difficult for some in practice.
4. finally, you could simply have a rule that playing a mine next to an existing mine returns the miner on the old mine to the players hand. this is the "found a better deposit in the area" rule. This is an easy way to randomly remove your opponents mine.
Interesting idea. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Maybe some play testing is needed.
- there could be two types of mines with slightly different rules? I could see silver and gold mines easily.
How would the rules change for a silver mine, and would it be worth it? I'm concerned about making this expansion more complicated than it already is.
- we could introduce a "mint" tile. it might earn the owner 4 points whenever it is the closest mint to a completed mine. (when >1 mint's are the same distance, they each earn 4 points.) the owner of a mint can remove his follower at any time, forgoing the ability to earn three points when the next mine is completed.
I would be more inclined towards calling it a smelter, and I'm sort of inclined towards only allowing it to score points if it is immediately within a gold mine's completion area.
Personally, I would advise against any form of scoring that occurs at the start or end of turns. The fairy scores at the start of turns and people forget and generally find that aspect more of a nuisance.
Perhaps this will help people get used to the idea then.
I do like the idea of generating gold pieces and them scoring similar to the way trade goods work. It's generally perceived that the score from trade goods gets weaker the more expansions you use. Just an idea, but has anyone considered linking gold pieces to trade goods in some fashion, perhaps with some interaction to boost the overall scoring of trade goods?
I don't think there are any provisions for this in the T&B rules, but it's probably a common house rule that trade goods can be traded at the end of the game. For example:
Player 1: 2 cloth, 1 wheat
Player 2: 2 cloth, 2 wheat
Player 3: 2 wheat, 1 cloth
Player 1 trades his 1 wheat to Player 3 for 1 cloth, allowing both of them to break their ties with Player 2 and score 10 points each while Player 2 scores no points (unless he has other trade goods).
