Responding to several different ideas at once here.... I've got a fairly massive Fluxx deck (~150 cards), and yes, as the deck grows, it tends to become Keeper-heavy and (especially) Goal-heavy. In my experience, the best approach is to embrace that tendency and then design Actions and New Rules to work with it. E.g., replace Keeper Limit 2 by Keeper Limit 5, and add cards like: * I Don't Need A Goal [New Rule]: At any time during your turn, you may discard 2 Goals and draw a card. [you could make it "draw 1 card", but I like the interaction with X=X+1 better this way] * Multitasking [New Rule]: When a new Goal is played, add it to the current collection of Goals on the table, without discarding any of them. In order to win the game, a player must satisfy (at least) 2 of the current Goals simultaneously. In case of a tie, keep playing until a clear winner emerges. * Playing For Keeps [Action]: Draw a card. If it is a Keeper, play it; otherwise, discard it. Repeat this process until you have played 3 Keepers. [in addition to getting lots of Keepers on the table, this is also good because it burns a lot of cards into the Trash, increasing the usefulness of Let's Do That Again and its ilk] * Quirky Bonus [New Rule]: If you have an odd number of cards in hand, ignore the Keeper Limit. If you have an odd number of Keepers in play, ignore the Hand Limit. [okay, so that one was actually invented just to annoy a friend of mine who thought Fluxx wasn't complicated enough--unfortunately, he actually liked it, and we were stuck with it in our deck for weeks...] It also helps if a good many of your Goals only require one of their Keepers to be on the table, or to be possessed by an opponent, rather than possessed by the winning player. My favorite example is "Pyramid Scheme: The player with the Pyramid wins, but only if someone *else* has Money on the table"; but there are lots of EcoFluxx goals that also work this way if you need inspiration. On an unrelated note, somebody was playing with X=X+1 variants, so I'll chip in my experience with those: It's surprisingly hard to make them work. Any card which decreases X tends to require too much exception text to be elegant, and any card which increases X by more than 1 tends to get ridiculous (unless your deck is huge). If you're playing in a math department, as I usually am, then X=2^X is good for laughs, and in practice it's not really any more broken than some of the more obvious choices like X=2X. But the best card of this form which we were able to come up with was...drum roll, please...X=3. Yes, really. This is actually a quite playable card (although it helps to take 10 Cards in Hand out of the deck when you use it), and it has some very interesting effects on the game--all of a sudden, Fluxx becomes much less fluxxy for a few rounds, since most of the New Rule cards no longer do anything. It's sort of like the "Rule of Three" card that someone else just mentioned, except it's stronger and it doesn't require you to invent metarules about replacing the Basic Rules card.... Oh, and the version of X=X+1 that affects *all* numbers, not just numerals, has been tried--it was Looney Labs' original version of the card! It broke too many things, and the numeral/number distinction was cleverly invented for Fluxx 3.0 to make X=X+1 function smoothly. (If you've got a version 2.x deck, you'll notice a lot of spelled-out numbers in places where 3.x has numerals....) Finally, somebody proposed some time ago that there could be multivariable cards, such as X=X+Y-1, where the value of Y would be set by additional New Rule cards provided for that purpose (some of which could say simple things like "The value of Y is now two", and others of which could be arbitrarily insane, e.g., "The value of Y is now equal to the number of Keepers possessed by the player with the fewest cards in hand"). I don't know whether anyone ever playtested this concept, though. On another unrelated note, I'm one of those people who feel that "instants" are just contrary to the spirit of Fluxx. The game has a carefully balanced level of chaos; if you start having moments when three people are trying to play at once, it's just too much. It works in M:TG, but M:TG doesn't have individual cards as powerful as Keeper Limit 1, or Scramble Keepers, or (any more) Take Another Turn. (On the other hand, I'm also one of those people who feel that "counts as" Keepers are just contrary to the spirit of Fluxx, so what do I know. :) ) Whew! that was a long monologue. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mailing list.... :) -- ___________________________________________________ Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/