Pretentious Board Games

The small island game is getting out of hand. I played a second game of it last night, and both players found highly lucrative strategies. One of the strategies snowballed in a really fun way, the other was degenerate, and I am putting in a fix for it. The snowbally one was just crazy awesome. Here is the end state: The right player found one stupid trick to gain 6-12 points a turn (Hint: it was 2x exploring every turn and then buying points once he had 30 goods). It only involved 2 specific cards and having three or more workers, so it was pretty bad. The left player stacked his abilities up until he could labor to: draw 10 cards, settle an island, tuck 3 cards for free, gain a free worker, and gain a point. This net him about 5 points a turn, but on a really good turn he could get 12 points. His strategy reached fruition slightly quicker, and was snowballing faster, so he would have won had he not drawn the entire deck and ended the game early. It felt like a wild engine b...

I have  been working on a new island themed card game recently. It currently has 72 cards (2 decks), 5 mats, and 9 tokens. Compared to Polynesia's 195 cards (6 decks), 7 mats, and 19 tokens, it seems like a decently smaller game. I have been considering calling it Micronesia, just to call that fact out, however it isn't really related to Polynesia, so I am a little bit hesitant to do so. I have decided on some basic rules and played a solo game. It is playable, but not balanced. It remains to be seen if other people will find it fun, however I found it to be an interesting exercise. I felt sorry for my right hand player, because, although he tried a few different strategies, he just couldn't compete with the left player who got a good engine set up pretty early in the game and just raked in the points for the rest of the game. The ending score was 52 to 36. I don't like that. I think that a player that is building up their engine for longer should have a distinct ad...