When landing on a generic square while playing Aethermon, you draw an encounter card – there are 5 for each area. 4 of these cards lead to a battle, the last one instructs the player to draw a special encounter card.
At the end of each round, all used encounter cards are shuffled back into their respective decks. If Aethermon was played with sequential turns rather than simultaneous turns it this last step would not be necessary, but with simultaneous turns a problem occurs if we do not reshuffle the deck.
Consider a turn where 4 players draw an encounter card from an area – none of which is the special encounter card. All players would know the last card is the special encounter. If two players desire a special encounter on the next turn they would both want to be the first to land in that area… but with simultaneous turns no player lands there first.
We could introduce a series of rules to determine who gets that last card, but Aethermon’s design philosophy always strives to minimise this sort of overhead.
To resolve this we simply reshuffle the cards between turns.
This left some of our playtesters with some mathematical quandaries of the implications of this decision. But we’ll get into that next week.
The world has been crazy of late, stay safe AetherRen