On Wednesday, July 11, 2007 James Hazelton wrote: > There are five of us in our weekly game group, and one week > we wanted to play Black Ice, but we couldn't play with an odd > number of players. So we decided to play a Mega game of Black > Ice. This involved five players, five dice, five nodes and > locks, and eight colours. The number of colours wasn't a > problem at all, and the number of dice balanced out the > number of locks. The big problem came with the number of > players. Even if you were able to tip three and hop two, by > the time your turn came around again, the locks were so > different that you'd have to start over again. This Mega- > variant may work with two players, but I don't think that any > version of Black Ice could work with five players. It's like > playing Fluxx with Keeper Limit 0. I had an idea for this. I'm not sure if you are familiar with Magic the Gathering, but in large multiplayer games of Magic, some folks use the concept of range, in that you are basically playing a three player game with the persons to your left and right, and you can ignore all others. You could do this with Black Ice. Say you have a group of five at the table. Put the locks in a circle with one lock directly in front of each player. Then, *your* three locks are the one to your left, the one in front of you, and the one to your right. Yes, it certainly makes AIM less potent, but it would solve the "by the time it gets back to me, all the locks have changed" problem. You can also have more than one set of dice, so more than one player can be taking a turn simultaneously (with the rule that you can't roll yet if the next player to is still taking his turn). Once there are only three players left, you take out one set of dice. I don't have enough equipment or local gamer friends to try this out, but it's an idea and you can see if it works for you. Topher