Rules Update for Illuminati?

[Steve Jackson]

As I work on the new expansion set, I'm thinking seriously about modding the basic Illuminati rules a bit.

Y2K increased the proportion of Special cards - which was IMHO a good thing overall, but sometimes made the uncontrolled area a bit sparse in the beginning. The new set also has a lot of Specials. So the following is open for discussion. (And while I don't mind people just hitting us with opinions, the posts that begin "We play Illuminati a lot, and having tried a few games with the new rules, here's what we found . . ." will be the ones that get the most serious consideration.)

Of the options below, (1) could be combined with any of the others, but the other three are mutually exclusive.

(1) Any time a player draws a Special card, he has the option to immediately discard it and draw again.

(2) At the end of each turn, if the uncontrolled area has fewer than two groups, draw cards until there are two uncontrolled groups. If a Resource is drawn, it goes to the uncontrolled area but does not count as a group. If a Special is drawn, discard it. [Resources are a new addition to Illuminati. They work pretty much the way they did in INWO.]

(3) For the first two rounds of play, each player starts his turn by drawing TWO cards - except the Network, which draws THREE.

(3a) Make that the first THREE rounds of play.


While I am not wedded to any of these changes, I consider Illuminati to be a living game, and just because it's been out there for 15 years, that does NOT mean its rules can't be tweaked to help the underdogs and make play more flexible.