I'm about to embark on my first mammoth solo game (trying to run 4 spirits). I've done most/all the setup for the other games I've played, but have only just noticed the following things:
The Dahan distribution isn't quite as symmetrical, but it's still pretty cool to have noticed. Kudos!
More precisely, each board has 3 coastal lands, the city is always in land #2, and the town is placed such that the initial explore will always hit 2 of each terrain per board. Previous board iterations did not have these properties, which could lead to accidentally lopsided games (either too easy or too hard) based on the card draw.
I'd noticed the part about city in land #2 and the town placed so that everything will always be hit on the initial explore, as well - those were a little more obvious.
The part about each terrain type having both a city and a town when all 4 tiles are in play is a little more subtle, along with the other observation I accidentally omitted from my original post about each type of terrain being blighted exactly once.
*nod*
And on any given board, the City, Town, and Blight are always in different terrain types, to temper Invader Deck-based swinginess in 1-3 player games.
The Dahan distribution would have some 4-board terrain symmetries (in addition to on-each-board numeric / terrain / coastal-vs-inland ones) if one of the Dahan in d7 were in d5 instead. I can't recall whether that was a deliberate change, or if it was an oversight.
Once I noticed the City/Town/Blight symmetries, I looked for it with the Dahan, too, and noticed it was missing. I wondered whether that was an oversight or not.
(By the way - Jon Hall lives in my town, and I've introduced both him and two of his kids to the game this week. He says hi.)
Thinking about the boards, I wonder if there is any plan in the future to add a Board E and F.
The Canonical playmat has six different lands, and symbols which are supposed to appear with a later expansion. So, is the plan to eventually release two additional boards so you can actually build the canonical map seen on the play mat?
I know I noticed the lack of symmetry with the Dahan during playtesting. (As a mathematician, symmetry in one of the first things I look for…) I remember Eric did have a good answer, but I forget what it was.