Bruno Faidutti's own shorter variant. The game ends when a player has built seven districts instead of eight, and everything else — scoring bonuses, the end-of-round completion so every player takes an equal number of turns, the bonus for the first player to finish — is unchanged. The standard game runs to eight, and at five or more players the last two districts are most of the length without being most of the decisions.
Does your table play this?
At the start of each round, after the character cards are shuffled, turn the card that would be set aside face down and leave it face up with the others that are removed. Every player then knows the full set of characters that are out of play this round before anyone drafts. The printed rules remove one character face down precisely so nobody knows it — which means a player who is passed over by the Assassin or the Thief can never tell whether their character was in the discard or in an opponent's hand. Revealing it turns the draft into a game of open information, and it works the same way in the original eight-character game and in editions where the table first picks eight characters from a larger pool.