Seven community “golden” rules
These go beyond the spiral order in the rulebook—they are popular fairness checks:
- Keep scarcest terrain from forming huge clumps.
- Watch abundant terrain (four tiles each) from surrounding one junction.
- Avoid parking a specialty port directly against the same resource on a six or eight.
- Skip identical numbers on touching hexes when you want calmer games.
- Never let sixes touch eights—most groups rank this highest.
- Think twice before the same number appears twice on one resource type.
- Spread sixes and eights across several resources so one color is not always “the hot one.”
How the balance score works
We start at ten and subtract for rough neighbors: touching six-and-eight pairs hurt the most, identical numbers hurt a bit, identical terrain hurts a little. Higher is calmer; if you dislike the feel, roll again.
Fair mode versus tournament mode
Fair mode focuses on keeping sixes and eights apart, with optional toggles for identical numbers or terrain if your group wants stricter checks without going all the way to tournament.
Tournament mode enforces the full strict bundle automatically and keeps shuffling until it finds a pass (again, up to two thousand tries—usually instant).