by rmsgrey
schleima wrote:
KogarashiKaze wrote:
schleima wrote:
You're supposed to eyeball the stack division, so some are thinner than others. Then you *shuffle* an epidemic card into reach pile. That means it's possible that card could come up first. Lastly, you restack the deck from thickest to thinnest. With thin stacks at the bottom, it means you're going to probably have more epidemics towards the end of the game.
This is actually incorrect too. You divide the player deck into five even piles (or as close as you can manage, noting which piles have one fewer card than the others). Then you shuffle the epidemic card into each pile, then restack with the thinnest piles (by one card) on the bottom, so the game ramps up slightly with its Epidemic timing. Basically a combination of the two approaches.
If you just "eyeball" it, you'll most likely have thicker stacks on the top than you're supposed to, which can make the early game easier and thus more winnable.
What you describe as dividing the deck "as close as you can manage", I call "eyeballing".
My point was that I stopped dealing down the deck into 5 even piles, which I communicated clearly in my original post
If you have 43 cards (48 cities plus 4 funded events minus 9 cards dealt in a 3 player game), you can't divide them evenly among 5 piles (without using scissors) so you get as close as you can manage - 9/9/9/8/8 - shuffle in the Epidemics, and stack them with the thicker piles on top.
And if you don't think you can manage to get the piles within 1 of the same size as each other by eye, I think you lack ambition.