Trickerion - Dahlgaard's Academy (Expansion)

This review is mainly for the Heir solo mode, created by solo board gaming extraordinaire, David Turczi. As great as the solo mechanics in Trickerion are (and Turczi's solo modes are truly the best in the industry), more than 90 percent of the time, he has problems with difficulty balancing. In so many of his games, "easy" mode is actually "normal", and "normal" is actually "hard." Trickerion is no exception.I absolutely know that the "easy" mode is really normal due to the super close scores I've been having playing on "easy", with a nice mix of balanced wins and losses. With "normal" mode, I've always been getting trounced by 20 to 40 points, no joke. When you have such a score discrepancy like this between two successive difficulty levels, there's definitely a problem with balancing, and it's certainly not the player's fault. This is a design flaw in difficulty scaling. Furthermore, I put a lot of brain power into every game that I played on "easy" and "normal." To put in this much thinking on "easy" with scores being super tight literally means that "easy" is actually Normal. This goes for the vast majority of Turczi's solo modes. So my recommendation here is to play Trickerion solo only on "easy" mode. "Normal" and above are too frustratingly unbalanced. just as much as the "normal" mode game I just finished.By the way, all my games were played without any expansions thrown in. I would imagine adding in the Academy would make "easy" more difficult, which would only prove my point even more.