Alternate Castellan Rules?

[coolpapa]

It seems like it's fairly standard for people to play that you can't play your Castellan until you've played at least as many cards as there are people behind you score-wise. I.e. the last place player can play it right away, but the leader in a four-player game has to play 3 other cards first. This prevents the leader from just scoring provinces before anyone else can get influence there to earn points, thus denying them a chance to catch up.

Is this available as an alternate rule in this implementation? Having no idea how it's coded, I don't know how difficult it would be to add, but it's a thought.

[MaBi]

No, this variant is not currently implemented here (I haven't played that many games of Kreta, but I'm not yet convinced there is really a need for this variant).

[coolpapa]

I've only played twice myself, so I'm just going by what I've heard. It wouldn't be a hard rule for people to implement themselves if they wanted it anyway.

[Knave75]

I am certainly no Kreta expert, but the basic tension of the game as far as I am concerned is the "now" vs. the "later". Do I score "now", or do I set up for "later". Delaying the play of the Casty would let me score "now" and build up stuff for "later", ruining the entire tension of the game.

Playing Casty involves losing an action, if your opponents are pushing the scoring forward, then you are getting a number of "free" actions that your opponents are not responding to. If that is not enough for you to catch up, then I would suggest that you have fairly lost the game.