First-Player Advantage Mitigation

In most turn-based games, going first is an advantage. Tempo is important in interaction-heavy games. Going first means getting to take the initiative and control the course of the game. It also means that if you're racing your opponent on something, you will win the race even if your opponent is able to mimic everything you do. Even if the game is low on interaction, something like getting first dibs on a shared resource pool can still give you an edge.

Of course, this can be frustrating for those who don't go first, so many games tweak their mechanics to balance the game. This is usually done in one of the following ways:

• Giving the non-starting player(s) extra resources. This method is straight-forward and easy to scale up for games with three or more players (just give the third player even more compensation resources than the second player, and so on).
• Limiting the first player's first turn in some way, such as having them skip a resource gathering phase. This method is more awkward to scale up, and mostly shows up in two-player games.
• When someone triggers the end of the game, the current "round" will finish, which ensures that everyone gets the same number of turns. For instance, if the play order is Alice, Bob, Carl, and Bob triggers the end of the game, Carl gets one more turn and Alice doesn't. This approach is common in games about Scoring Points.

This kind of rule usually shows up in games that focus on being competitive, such as Euro Games. Most other games don't bother. Party games and family games usually have enough variance to mask any first-player advantage they may have, and their main draw is never "it's good for competitive play" anyway. Similar arguments apply to American-style games.

Sometimes, a game was not originally designed with such mechanics but turns out to have a non-negligible first-player advantage in competitive play. This often leads to the addition of a first-player advantage mitigation rule, which has happened for games from Magic: The Gathering to Go. If no such fix is possible, tournaments will have to take into account that games are lopsided in favour of the first player; for instance, chess matches usually have an even number of games, with both players getting the same number of games with each colour.

See also Extrinsic Go-First Rule to figure out who goes first. Compare Comeback Mechanic, Extra Turn, and Obvious Rule Patch.

Note: This trope is exclusive to turn-based games.

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Examples

Board Games

• Each round of Alchemists has players choose their place in the initiative order. Players choosing a later position on the track may get extra resources, but may lose out on being first on a given action.
• Arimaa has the first player setup their pieces, allowing the second player to notice that the first player is trying a non-standard opening, or to create a response in the setup (e.g. aim their elephant towards the opponent's camel to make it easier to capture).
• In Azul, the player who takes the first player tile starts the subsequent round, but the tile gives them -1 point due to filling one space of broken tiles, meaning they are more likely to lose additional points if they fail to place additional tiles.
• Chess has a well-documented first-player advantage, but even here there are mitigations:
  • Tournament matches get around this by giving each player an equal number of games as White and Black rather than changing the game, but there's an exception for Armageddon rules, which are designed to force a decisive result and can't go this route. Instead, they give both sides a bonus with Black's draw odds (meaning black wins if the game result is a draw) being stronger than White's time advantage to compensate for White's first-move advantage.
  • Although Black has to cope with a relative lack of initiative, Black's early moves often matter more than White's in determining the sort of opening that a game follows—a significant factor.
• Codenames awards a win to the first team to uncover all of their cards. To compensate for the advantage of going first, the second team has one less card to unturn. Additionally, the captain of the second team is also allowed to decide which way up the color grid (that tells the team captains what words their team needs to guess) will be at the start of the game.
• The Century series of board games has starting resources based on player start order but varies based on the installment. In Golem Edition, the later start players have more resources. In Eastern Wonders, starting resources seems equal in raw value, but is picked up in reverse turn order, possibly allowing earlier access to a market.
• In Everdell, the first player starts with 5 cards. For each subsequent step in the turn order, the player in question gets one additional card. This compensates for how the first player gets the first opportunity to visit exclusive locations, play cards from the Meadow and achieve events.
• In Go, the player with the black stones has an advantage because their going first gives them the initiative. The komi system was introduced to even things out by giving extra points to the player with the white stones. The exact value varies but is usually between 5 and 8 points (and usually a half-integer to make draws less likely).
• In Happy City, the end of the game is triggered when someone builds their 10th building. However, the round is finished to ensure that everyone gets the same number of turns.
• Some Hex versions introduce a swap rule. If the first player picks an opening that is seemingly powerful, the second player can either swap sides or swap pieces. In general, the first move in the middle of the board tends to be a swap candidate.
• Imhotep: The starting player takes 2 stones at the beginning, and each successive player cumulatively gains one additional stone. As a side note, one action is to collect three stones from the quarry to a maximum of 5, and therefore the first player may let the other players take their actions.
• Players in Istanbul can move to a location, and other players activating the location's ability need to pay 2 Lira to whomever is there. To mitigate this advantage the first player gets, subsequent players gain an additional starting Lira than the previous player.
• When someone reaches 12 points in a victory condition in Living Forest, it triggers the end of the game, but the remaining players in the turn order still get to play their last turn.
• Lords Of Waterdeep: The first player begins the game with 4 coins, and every other player has one more coin than the player going before them (2nd player has 5, 3rd has 6, etc).
• Lost Ruins of Arnak: The further behind you are in the play order, the more valuable your set of starting resources will be. This compensates for your opponents' ability to go to locations you wanted.
• Res Arcana: For the first round, magic items are drafted in the opposite of the play order. This gives the later players the chance to grab a good one, which helps compensate for how they're at risk of falling behind in the race for Places of Power and Monuments.
• Salem 1692: The witch players secretly nominate which player will go first at the start of the game, by placing a black cat token in front of them while the other players have their eyes closed. Whenever the Conspiracy card is drawn from the deck, the player with the black cat in front of them must reveal one of the Confession cards that serves as their "lives". The black cat can be moved to another player by certain action cards.
• Settlers of Catan: Initial placement of one's first two settlements can make or break an entire game as they will determine what resources and how many one has in the early game. And a good first placement can lead to exponential growth in terms of resource yield in the late game since cities (which doubles the yield of resources the city is adjacent to) can only be built on top of existing settlements. Thus, in the placement phase, the sequence goes clockwise from the player who placed their settlement first until the last person, then it reverses. This allows for the last person to place two settlements simultaneously and forces the player who got the first settlement on the board to place their second settlement after all other players, balancing out their first-mover advantage.
• SHASN: During the setup, the player who will go first receives only 1 resource token, the second player 2, the third 3, and so on. This is to mitigate the advantage the first player has in picking where to place their voter pegs on an empty board, with efficient placement getting increasingly difficult the more pegs are on it.
• Space Base gives extra resources to non-starting players, with more valuable ones going to the players later in the play order, to compensate for how the first player gets the first chance to buy ships. The game also has the "finish the round after someone triggers the end of the game" rule.
• Star Realms has the first player draw three cards on the first turn rather than five.
• Splendor:
  • The end of a Splendor game is triggered once someone reaches 15 points, but the game finishes the round to make sure that every player gets the same number of turns, giving them a chance to surpass whoever was the first to reach the 15-point mark.
  • In the two-player spin-off Splendor Duel, you automatically win if you fulfil a victory condition at the end of your turn. As this gives the second player a disadvantage in the race for these conditions, they're compensated by starting the game with a Privilege, a currency that lets them take one Gem or Pearl on their turn as a free action.
• Tokaido: The player going 1st starts with one less coin than is listed on their player card, the player going 2nd has the exact amount, the player going 3rd has one more, and so on.
• Twilight Struggle: USSR moves first in the setup. USA therefore can form a response opening to the USSR. In addition, the computer version supports bidding to choose a side, thus someone wanting to play USSR can take a handicap as well.
• Villainous: The player going second starts with one additional Power (currency), and two additional Power are added for every subsequent player. This helps balance out how the first player has an advantage in the villains' race to reach their objective first.
• Wallenstein implements a bidding system, where players that want to go first (or at least want first pick at the special ability) pay resources to do so.

Collectible Card Games

• To mitigate the first player's tempo advantage in Magic: The Gathering, Wizards eventually added the rule that the starting player skips the draw step of their first turn in duels (Games with 3 or more players do not have this rule).
• In the Pokémon TCG, the player who goes first is not allowed to attack on their first turn.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • The first player can't conduct their Battle Phase on their first turn, as they would otherwise get a nigh-unavoidable shot at their opponent's LP. It turned out that the game still had a considerable first-player advantage, so as of the Master Rules 3, the first player cannot draw cards during their first Draw Phase. As it stands, the ability to make a board first before the opponent greatly outweighs these two downsides as having a field built grants a much higher number of interactions that can be used to stop the opponent from playing. However, a player going second can mitigate this by running cards with Spell Speed 2 effects that activate from the hand, referred to as "hand traps" by the playerbase, to slow down the player going first, or alternatively run cards exclusively designed to be played going second such as Mass Card Removal effects.
  • Worse, if the Speed Duel format is being followed, starting hands begin at 4 cards per player, which can handicap the first turn player that has to start with said paltry hand and doesn't even get to decide whether to go first or second if they win the coin toss and they run a deck that benefits more from going second.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel, in addition to lacking a turn 1 Battle Phase like the original Yu-Gi-Oh!, the player going first starts with 4 cards in their hand while the player going second starts with 5. The player going first still draws for turn, however, functionally making it equal to the draw rules in Yu-Gi-Oh!.
• Digimon Card Game: The memory counter always starts at zero, so whoever goes first will have their turn ended the moment they spend any memory. It's usually enough to hatch a Digi Egg and either Digivolve it twice, or Digivolve it once and play a Tamer or Option. The second player can do a little bit more thanks to however much the first player spent. Adding on to this, the first turn player does not draw.
• Cardfight!! Vanguard: The first player typically reaches Grade 3 before their opponent (gaining access to their ace card and the ability to drive check two cards instead of one), and despite the rule that the first player cannot attack on their first turn, the game has struggled to effectively balance this. For example, later editions of the game introduced cards that allowed the second player to draw twice on their first turn, and limited the use of certain abilities if your opponent's Vanguard was not Grade 3. However, these changes created situations where there are some decks that prefer to go second: most notably, Stride decks want to go second because they cannot Stride to Grade 4 if their opponent's Vanguard is not Grade 3, so going second allows them to immediately pull out the big guns by going straight from Grade 2 to 3 to 4 in one turn. Eventually, the game changed the rules so that instead of determining the first player randomly, the player who wins a rock-paper-scissors match can choose whether to go first or second.
• Future Card Buddyfight: Initially, the first player could not draw on their first turn and they could only conduct one battle on their first turn. However Buddyfight is an extremely fast game and your opponent can produce an OTK as soon as their turn starts. Hell even first turn players can produce an OTK under the right conditions. Thus when they started Buddyfight Ace, they allowed the first turn player to draw on their first turn, though they could still only attack once during that turn, allowing the first turn player to better defend themselves.
• Weiss Schwarz: The first player can only conduct one battle during the battle phase. This is important as attacking is the primary way to build stock, your main resource. Not counting characters that can attack multiple times, a full center stage will have three characters, in other words, 3 stock per turn.

Sports

• In American Football, the team that wins the toss gets the choice of whether to get first possession. Assuming they choose to go first (most do) the other team picks which goal to defend. Depending on the direction and strength of the wind this can be significant. Sometimes teams defer choosing whether to receive or kick to the second half as well, in which case the other team chooses whether to kick or receive in the first half to even the odds.

Video Games

• Inverted in Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, which has the player who loses the opening coin flip be the one with an advantage since if they're the first to pass, the other player will be forced to go into the next round with card disadvantage. The player who goes first starts the game with Strategic Advantage on the board to compensate, which can be played to boost one of their units by five points, along with getting an extra mulligan before the first round starts. Strategic Advantage can be replaced by a handful of other Stratagems in the deck editor, most of which play for a five-point difference, but others provide more unique benefits, such as putting a card in your hand at the bottom of your deck and replacing it with a card of your choice from your deck.
• Hearthstone:
  • The player who loses the opening coin flip starts with four cards in their mulligan instead of three. They also get The Coin added to their hand, a special card that can be played at any time for 1 extra mana that turn.
  • The developers tried a lot of different methods to balance going second before the game went live. One idea was to start the player with a free Avatar of the Coin, a 1/1 minion with no effect. It was removed sometime before the open beta, but still exists in the game files.
• Jurassic World: The Game: Averted in the Player Versus Player battles and a few of the weekly events. Typically the match is over once one team completely knocks out the other, with 3 creatures per team. The player and the AI opponents (as despite all appearances, the player will never actually fight another player even in the PVP battles) are always granted a set number of points to use per turn, which they can use to defend, attack, or reserve (which means their points will be much higher on their next turn). Whoever starts first gets 1 point on their first turn, while whoever goes second gets 2 points on their first turn. In theory, the second player should have the advantage, but because both players have their point limits increased by the same amount, it actually puts the second player at a huge disadvantage, simply because the first player will reach the max amount of points allowed per turn sooner than the second player will. To put this into perspective, if the first player reserved their points on turns 1-3, they would go from 1 to 3 to 6, while the second player would only have 4 points at the start of the first player's third turn, and unless the second player is running a Stone Wall of a tank, the two-point difference is usually enough for the first player to take down the second player's first creature. The second player then is forced to either attack, at the risk of having fewer points in defense or reserve for the next turn, or do nothing and let the first player build up their points again, and in both cases potentially leaving the second player's second creature incredibly exposed for the first player to take down.
• Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes: The player who gets the first turn only gets 2 moves on that turn, instead of the normal 3. Inverted if that player has the Celerity Ring equipped, which gives them 5 moves on their first turn instead.
• Monster Sanctuary: During the first turn of Keeper Duels, the player going first is only allowed to attack with 2 of their 3 Mons.
• Nintendo Wars: Most custom-made maps (as seen in Advance Wars by Web) give an infantry to the second player to offset the first player's advantage of going first.
• Shadowverse: Evolution points are used to evolve your followers, which gives them the ability to attack without needing to wait, gives a sizeable stat boost, and can even trigger evolve abilities. Evolution points are in very limited supply and effects that replenish them are uncommon. The player going first gets two evolution points and gains access on their fifth turn, while the player going second gets three and gains access one turn earlier.

In-Universe Examples

Literature

• Star Trek novel Planet Of Judgment. Spock is playing a game against an alien opponent where they each answer questions. The opponent is given the first question to answer. Later in the game, Spock protests that the alien being allowed to answer first gave it an advantage. The moderator agrees and gives Spock credit for a correct answer.

Web Video

• Parodied in ProZD's "learning all the steps in a card game". The first player is learning the game, so the other player is telling him about all the phases... only to then tell him he has to skip most of them because he's the first player.
• In the Tokaido episode of Table Top, the players modify the existing rule on 1st player advantage so that the player going first has to give the player going last one coin. This result's in Wil's character, the Starving Artist Hiroshige (who normally starts with 3 coins) having to pay J's character, the wealthy samurai Kinko (who normally starts with 7), leading to quips about Kinko being the 1%.

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