Palmyra, Rule Clarifications
c.r.l...@bra0106.wins.icl.co.uk
A question was raised on the rules for Palmyra. No, not the usual question
about the buying/selling of commodities but a new one concerning the cards
running out at the end of the Trading Year.
Thanks to Mark Engelberg who raised the question in the first place and of
course to Reiner Knizia for providing the answer.
Before I get into the body of the question I would like a quick aside. If
people are wondering why I have not updated my Euphrates & Tigris web page
http://freespace.virgin.net/chris.lawson/rk/e-t/
in such a long time, well I apologise but currently I do not have the time.
Also coupled with the fact I now write web pages at work most of the day, I no
longer have the enthusiasm to do so all evening as well. I would have liked to
include this in a Palmyra FAQ along with a ton of other stuff as well. Maybe
in a couple of months when the words Platinum Edition no longer send me crazy,
I may be able to get things running again on my web sites.
Anyway, back to the question.
The rules book states the following under the section "End Of A Trading Year"
"Each player, in turn, has the right to discard one or more cards and replace
them from the deck. All the cards are removed from the board and shuffled into
the pack. The game continues with a new Trading Year."
The following comes from the original rules.
"After the trading session is concluded all the cards are removed from the
board and shuffled into the deck.
Each player may discard as many cards as he wishes in one go and replace them
from the deck. After all the players have done this all discarded cards are
shuffled into the deck."
The point that Mark questioned was what happens if the deck runs out of cards.
If you read the printed rules, it is clear that you only gather together the
discards and shuffle AFTER the players have discarded/replaced. This could
lead to the situation where the cards run out.
What should happen is that all the discards are gathered together and the deck
is shuffled before the players discard/replace, after this has been done they
are gathered together and shuffled for a second time. It should not be
possible for the deck to run out now.
Why did this problem occur? It would appear that the translator decided to be
clever. He thought that the deck did not require to be shuffled twice and
therefore rewrote the rules, without checking with the designer! What is even
worse is that the rules had already been translated into English and were made
available to Editrice Giochi (the Italian games company who produce Palmyra).
They decided to translate from scratch the German version of the rules! This
did lead to a few problems in other areas as well. The following has been
reported in the Games Cabinet before but I may as well repeat it again.
The English translation in the rule booklet said you had 3 options on each
turn :
1) pass
2) buy/sell 2 amphoras of one commodity
3) buy/sell 1 amphora of each of the 3 commodities
Option 3 seems to imply that you had to buy/sell exactly three commodities
(one of each). This is wrong, you may buy/sell up to one of each commodity
(i.e. at most one of each of the three commodities).
Hope that helps.
Chris Lawson
chris....@virgin.net
http://freespace.virgin.net/chris.lawson/18xx/
http://freespace.virgin.net/chris.lawson/rk/
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