I found a neat and simple way to eliminate the first player advantage:
After deciding the player order, instead of everyone shuffling up their 7 Coppers and 3 Estates do this:
Player 1: normal starting deck
Player 2: puts one Estate in his discard pile, then shuffles deck and draws 5
Player 3: puts two Estates in his discard pile, then shuffles deck and draws 5
Player 4: puts three Estates in his discard pile, then shuffles deck (no need really
) and draws 5
This means player 2 can have a $4/$4 or $5/$3 opening, player 3 could start with $5/$4 and player 4 might get $5/$5. After the opening the game continues as normal.
Simulations have shown this will normalize the playing field for any 2-player game. 3 player games will also be balanced on most boards, but the 4-player game will sometimes not be normalized at all: imagine player 4 opening Mountebank/Mountebank while player one is stuck with Silver/Bishop...
If enough people are interested I could do an article on simulating different game variants that try to eliminate the first player advantage...
)
Nobody else has this problem, which makes no sense. 404 errors shouldn't be user-specific....
