I have a friend who, when playing Dominion with folks other than me, plays with a few house rules. The one he's most adamant about is each player getting an equal number of turns (not counting extra turns, presumably). I can think of some reasons that equal turns would not improve Dominion, but I'd like to hear your reasoning. Why doesn't Dominion have equal turns like, say, Kingdom Builder? Thanks.
First, most people who aren't serious gamers don't even notice that it's a thing. They do not say, well you got one more turn than me; they have no idea that this is the case. They really really don't notice it. If there was no tiebreaker rule they would never notice it.
Second it's simpler to not finish the round. Originally there was also no tiebreaker, so you didn't have to track who went first at all. The tiebreaker was added as a compromise; Valerie and Dale wanted an awful turn-order tiebreaker, and I guess could not understand the reasoning that explains how awful that is. They said live with it, I said I won't, Jay said I'm going with the game designer (later I realized he had to contractually). But I agreed to a number-of-turns tiebreaker because that didn't have issues, beyond the tracking. It's fairer but you can argue that it's better for casual players to have no tiebreaker, because then they don't have to track who went first and you aren't drawing attention to this advantage. Serious players sometimes desperately want a tiebreaker, they want a winner even if it means counting random data; casual players, not so much, they are happy to tie, especially in a multiplayer game where some players are not in on the tie.
It's obviously good to go first, but people are used to that, in game after game with turns it's good to go first, equal turns or not.
The end condition means if you finish the round you then want to add Provinces, so that those turns aren't lame. That's not always relevant and doesn't always do the trick, but you know, often it's relevant and does the trick. So you add say 8 Provinces, it's a physical game so we still need to draw the line somewhere. We turn the bottom 8 sideways so we know when the game end condition is hit. People talk of "phantom Provinces" but you know, why not solidify those phantoms. Anyway you could do this, but it's a negative, it's more work and wonkier, even if just a little more work and a little wonkier.
When I first made Dominion, the initial end condition was "any empty pile." It directly answered the question, "what if I want a card and there aren't any left." Yes you could buy the last card and have another buy left. Anyway I needed an end condition, I picked that one, that was what it started as. We would usually empty the Provinces. Sometimes you would go for say Remodel and need to worry about how many you left in the pile (there were ten cards in each action pile; leave four Remodels, that's my advice), and who was winning when the piles got low.
The end condition was the end condition, it didn't have a "finish the round" clause. I had never had a "finish the round" clause in any game and did not start here. I had a lot of simultaneous play games where everyone got the same number of turns naturally, but when I had turns, the game ended at some point and we would not necessarily have had the same number of turns. Again, like in most games. I was not constantly playing commercial games that finished the round either, except ones where this was in some way natural as with simultaneous play. Like, in Medici, you finish the round in that you play until the boats are all full; in Through the Desert, you don't finish the round. We never thought "wow some players get more turns in Through the Desert, what's up with that." We never wondered why the round didn't finish for Settlers of Catan or Cartagena or Carcassonne or whatever game.
I always had the "winner goes last next game" rule. Despite going last, the best player did fine. It was obviously good to go first, but it wasn't wrecking the game. We would always play multiple games, and if you weren't winning, you would probably get your chance to go first. You don't want to be sitting on the wrong side of the best player; this never made anyone change seats.
There was never a point where we thought, man this needs fixing, how about finishing the round.
As I said above, once RGG had the game, late in the going, Valerie and Dale wanted a turn-order tiebreaker to address the advantage to going first. That was awful, like I said - oops you lose despite not actually getting an extra turn this game, due to this in-your-face coin flip. And hey it doesn't do anything about the case where you don't tie, where the advantage is so meaningful that it just wins for you. Anyway that awful thing was what they suggested to address turn-order advantage; that's all that came up. It was bad and I got to shoot it down, hooray.
Once Dominion was in the wild, some people felt like they needed to finish the round (as always, play whatever variants you want, I don't mind). When this news hit I did not feel like I had blown it or like I wanted to shift to playing that way. I think it's much better to play multiple games and rotate who wins (or, even better, have the winner go last).
This did make me aware though that some people would be like that, that they would want to right this particular injustice in future games.
So then one day I made Kingdom Builder. The game end condition was going to be someone running out of pieces - obv. I didn't want them to get more turns with no pieces. And it seemed like, the player running out of pieces is ahead, they played more pieces, pieces are how you score points. They may have been playing more dead pieces but you know, they have the advantage here. So, I could finish the round, like all those people wanted for Dominion. So I tried it out, I had the round being finished from the beginning. It worked fine so that never changed. It addresses turn order advantage to such a degree there that Queen thought the last player had the edge, due to Lords (as you can see from their rule determining who goes first), although I think obv. the first player has the edge in games without Lords and even some games with Lords.
Nefarious, Infiltration, Greed, and Gauntlet of Fools are all simultaneous, with no turn imbalance to be addressed. The way Monster Factory works, finishing the round (by say reserving some tiles for that situation) would not mean much, and obv. it's not worth the extra complexity. It doesn't make much sense for Piņa Pirata and is not too relevant for its audience. Unannounced upcoming game has turns and does not finish the round, although there is a thing to reduce turn-order-based advantages.
