Reducing the Luck Factor

One of the biggest concerns for many of you was the luck factor of the cards in each player's starting hand and the randomness of creating a mission objective in the grid. We are very pleased and excited to announce that we have taken both of these concerns very seriously and after endless playtesting and brainstorming, we have come up with more than a few changes that will reduce the luck factor.

A mulligan option has been added so that players can discard their starting hand and receive new event cards if they feel the previous ones were weak. At the start of each player's first turn, they can choose to discard their 7-card hand and draw a new 6-card hand from the deck. This is more than enough to reduce the chance of having no good cards in your starting hand.
At the start of the game, players will only be given 2 easy mission objective cards. If a player wants to complete a medium or hard objective, they will have to work to get it. You see, instead of just getting a new objective when you complete a previous one, players now have to take an action to get new missions, and it's up to them which one they choose. This removes the luck of the starting mission draw, where a player could create a hard mission and get a lot of points without working hard or spending a lot of resources. It also puts the risk entirely in the player's hands: will you choose easy missions to play it safe but earn less points, or will you put your money on harder missions to win the game? This choice is even more tricky when you consider that there is a hand limit of three missions, so if a player takes more than that they will have to discard them.
The free use of cards on your player board at the start of the game has also been removed. As many of you have objected, it seemed unfair and unbalanced for one player to start with powerful cards in their hand and play one for free, while others have less powerful cards and are forced to play one just because it was free. So in the new version of Restart, all cards played on your player board must be paid for. This gives players the option of not playing expensive cards and keeping their resources for other actions, or paying a high cost to place cards on their player board and trying to benefit from them as much as possible. This is entirely a player decision and not a matter of luck.

What do you think of these changes? Do you think they are enough to make the game more tactical and less luck-based? Let us know what you think and help us make Restart an even better and more enjoyable boardgame.

Embark on a thrilling journey through time with Restart, a tactical engine-building game that challenges you to alter the course of events to save the world.