While Kdice is largely a game of luck, the difference between good and bad players is the little strategic subtleties that some will master better than others because, in the end, luck is the same for everyone. On any given game, you have to be lucky to win. In the long run, however, you have to be good to succeed.

Once that is understood (if you think luck is different for everyone, stop reading), I think it's interesting to look at possibilities to extend the amount of strategy depth involved in the game. One very simple addition to the game could have huge strategic repercussions which, in my opinion, would be very beneficial for the game as a whole.

What I'm proposing here is territory surrendering. It's exactly like flagging, but instead of losing all your territories, only the ones you select are "grayed out".

Imagine an island (this is a territory that is not connected to your empire) and the possibility to gray it out. Anyone can take it over, and it doesn't count towards your number of territories owned. This simple action reduces greatly the "luck factor" of kdice by strategically surrendering territories in order to get "better builds" in your empire.

That small change would then bring up a multitude of different strategies and greatly improve the depth of the game.

Let's say you have 3 territories that are cornering an enemy island. You can't take it with your 2 small stacks due to very bad odds, but if you take it with your big stack you will get stucked (good players will agree that you never corner your big stack). If surrendering territories was possible, you could surrender a low stacked territory and eat it back with your big stack. In the same manner, you can "position" your stacks in your empire to better protect it without actually moving your dice around, but rather "eating yourself" with it.

There are lots of example where surrendering your territories would bring very interesting strategies into the game, I'm sure you can come up with tons of them.

I could see a couple of downsides, obviously, but I think there are ways around them.

Any opinions?