I tried a three-player game at Origins and it was obviously unbalanced. In fact, at the start of the game, the employee giving us the demo (who was actually the game's artist) brought up the fact that the middle spot was problematic. He (John, I take it?) offered to play in that position, since the other two of us were new to the game. As expected, it wasn't long before the game's artist was out of it. The guy who created the game was playing around at a table next to us. He overheard that John was out. He chided John about it, to which John told him that he'd played in the dreaded middle spot. The response was a knowing and sympathetic, "Ooooooh!".

Perhaps there is some starting setup that would make a 3p game more balanced, but the one provided in the rules isn't it. It does seem to make a nice game for 2 or 4 players, but I almost think that they should avoid calling it a 3 player game.

In playing the demo game, I noticed one other thing that's odd about the game. I'm surprised that the cards are printed on standard rectangular card stock, rather than on cards that are a more square format. The rectangular format is fine for a 2 player game, since the players have their cards oriented toward themselves. It makes the 3 and 4 player idea seem to be an afterthought, however, since the side players must play with their cards oriented sideways on the board (relative to themselves). Also, square cards would have allowed the board to be square. I'm assuming that the card decision was made to keep cost down -- I suppose that rectangular cards, being a standard card stock, made the game cheaper. I will have to give them credit for that -- at Origins the game was selling for a meager $15, so they've certainly got the price down.