On the tech tree side, at least there are fewer draws. And now there are lots of rare techs as well as Developments. Lots of things to spend your pink on. But yeah, for sure, sometimes one person gets the Rock and the Paper never shows up, both greasing Rock’s rails and making it very hard on Scissors to leverage their advantage. Hard to stop computer/missile platforms if you can’t score that -2 shield.

Smaller table also means you can spend quite a bit more time doing your own thing without your aggro neighbor, two hexes away, getting in your business. We played with the “lost homeworlds” (or whatever it’s called) variant where you populate the other homeworld spots in ring 2 with NPC homeworlds, populated with tough-ish Ancient cruisers. That’s another speedbump to deal with. By the time we finally met it was turn 5, maybe? And we’d all had a chance to go down our respective paths a bit.

Those big tables get so claustrophobic so fast.