This was an opportunity to teach the game to a new player who was not a regular gamer. She had at least heard of Catan, although I'm not sure if she had played.
We played with 2nd edition rules, including all the new events, and players starting out with points on the score tracks.
Since it was a learning game I shortened the play length, taking out 12 plants & animals, and 4 events (leaving 24 and 8 respectively).
Notes
I'm going to work on a demo script for teaching a few sample rounds of the game, probably with a fixed scenario. The game is very free form, there's nothing telling you where you should go, or which character you should use. I think providing some more structure for a few rounds of play would help. Our guest this time felt she fully grasped the game a few turns before the end.
The Atlatl & Spear event just needs to say how much it costs, not the discount it gives. It should end the turn.
The Cornucopia event did nothing, which would likely often be case. New idea: each player, starting with you and proceeding to the left, scores as if they had just turned in a value 1 plant of their choice. After being scored that plant value drops to the bottom.
What's next?
There's a little more work I think can be done balancing out hunter and gatherer abilities. I could try limiting the animals a hunter can carry, something like no more than 3 meat 3 hide. But, rather than start with limitations, I'm going to experiment with some improvements to the gatherer side. One thing I've included in my trial print run of 2nd edition is higher value plant tiles.
Another new idea is to allow players to combine and score multiple plant tiles at once. So if you had one nut, and two nuts, you could score it as 3 nuts, which could make as many as 12 or 15 points, depending on the number of players. Right now higher point scoring is far more common on the hunting side. Since there are 3 different kinds of plants, this won't be as common as you might think, but it might lead to new strategies.
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