The diagrams and tables below represent my excessively geeky anaylsis of Fluxx, a really cool card game by Looney Labs.
The power of a Keeper is my very rough measure of how useful the card is in a game. It's simply the number of things the Keeper is potentially good for--satisfying a Goal, blocking a Goal, and triggering a Bonus all being counted equally. In reality, certain potential uses should be weighted more heavily than others, but I haven't gotten that obsessed (yet).
Apologies for the sloppy handwriting; it seemed the quickest way....
| Keeper Power: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Keepers: | 5 | 8 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
| Average Keeper Power = 2.1 | |||||
| (with the 2 promo Goals, AKP = 2.2) | |||||
| Keeper Power: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Keepers: | 6 | 10 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| Average Keeper Power = 2.0 | |||||
| (with the 5 promo Goals, AKP = 2.4) | |||||
| Keeper Power: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Keepers: | 0 | 14 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| Average Keeper Power = 2.3 | |||||
| Keeper Power: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Keepers: | 1 | 3 | 7 | 1 | 1 |
| Average Keeper Power = 2.9 | |||||
| Keeper Power: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Keepers: | 0 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 0 |
| Average Keeper Power = 3.1 | |||||
Note that the two proposed Fluxx editions both have average Keeper powers substantially higher than the current Version 3.0. What this means in practice is that any randomly selected pair of Keepers is much more likely to match some Goal in the deck (since, in all editions, Keeper uses other than Goal satisfaction make a small contribution to average Keeper power).
The proposed editions have smaller deck size than Version 3.0 as well. In particular, they have a smaller pool of Goals, so that any specific Goal is more likely to appear soon than is the case in Version 3.0.
Each of these effects would seem likely to shorten the length of a typical game, by increasing the likelihood that the cards in play at any given time will include a satisfied Goal.
Also, in the proposed Fluxx Jr. deck, the variance of the Keeper powers is quite large; the Gift has power 1 while the House has power 5. No other Fluxx edition has a difference of more than 2 points from the most powerful to the least powerful Keeper, and no other edition has a Keeper with a power as large as 5. I am not certain what effect this wide spread of Keeper powers would have on gameplay; I'll have to do some empirical research....