I delved into that issue with my recent design. The game works just fine and is fun and interesting to play. The only shortcoming is that with two players there's a possibility in a certain situation to make decisions that can break the game. That situation occurs approximately every 20th game, so 1 in 20 games might be broken.
Of course if someone doesn't actually want to play and wants to mess up the whole game for everyone, it can be done too, but only with two players.
I could avert these problems with a couple of rules, but generally I don't want to make a lot of rules that need to be remembered. So I haven't yet decided what to do to it.
After all these problems arise only if someone starts to pursue such an outcome intentionally.
So what do you think? How would you describe a broken game?
Sheesh - would have saved all these comments until AFTER he tells us HOW the game becomes "broken".
And in my opinion a game is "broken" if there is a SINGLE strategy that will effectively work every time the game is played. If that is the case, the game is "broken" in that there is no need to PLAY the game -- the puzzle is solved.
__Note:__ To counter this, all you need is to reduce some of the determinism by adding dice, shuffling or other forms of randomization which break a sole strategy that may be used by a player to "exploit" a defect in a game...
It hasn't happened yet, but mathematically the probability should be around there.
The game is broken if someone manages to get the best combination of cards during first half of the game. If that same player is also in an inferior position against the other player, he might begin to reduce his card hand down to as low as he can get it before the game ends. During this first phase the hand card amount is reduced by discarding them out of the game. If the situation arises around the mid-game the opponent can try to counteract this by speeding up the game so that the other player might not have enough turns to achieve his goal. Speeding up will not work during the first rounds.
During the second phase, the player who first runs out of cards ends the game and no more cards are allowed to be played. Now the player with highest score wins.
Most of the cards are interdependent, but there's one card type without dependencies and one card type to counteract that independent card type. This independent card type is the primary cause for the game to be broken at times. Both of those cards are required so they are not going to be thrown out of the game. The counteracting card type mostly fixes the problem, but not completely. 1/20 probability is related to dealing of the cards. If a player gets one or more of the counteracting cards, the problematic strategy is rendered useless for that player. The counteracting cards have around 1/10 chance to solve the problem if it arises. In the beginning of the game, no-one has any cards and the cards are aquired during the first phase of the game.
In other words, if a player wants to ruin the game, he just doesn't try to get the highest score, but only the very best cards and then play them during the second phase. Mostly it ain't easy to get them and also no-one knows how many and which cards aren't available at all during the game. So these randomness layers make it useful strategy only if a certain situation happens during the early game and there's a player with weak to no plan for the second phase at that moment.
The game takes around 15 minutes to play with two players so the problem isn't as bad as it could be.
The game box contains a set for two players and those sets can be combined to get more players into the game.