How to handle late game tile drawing in Tsuro

Question

The rules in Tsuro are very vague about what happens once the players start to run out of tiles. What's the best way to handle how titles are drawn in Tsuro when a player goes out, and other players are lacking tiles. I know the dragon title is placed at the end of the deck, and signifies that a player who draws the dragon tile should received a card once one becomes available, but what happens if more then one player has less then three tiles?

It's conceivable for a player to go out to take out more then one player, possibly freeing multiple tiles. Should all player lacking tiles go back up to three if they can?

Answer 1

The rules in my copy and on the official site are quite clear:

If the active player has the dragon tile, he or she places it at the bottom of the draw pile and draws a tile from the top. If the active player does not have the dragon tile, he or she draws a tile from the top of the draw pile.

Starting with the active player and moving clockwise, each player with fewer than three path tiles draws a tile, continuing around the board until all players have three path tiles or the draw pile is empty.

When new tiles become available later in the game, the first player to draw a tile will be the player with the Dragon tile instead of the active player. That player sets aside the Dragon tile when drawing a path tile.

That said, they are quite wordy. So let me rephrase them:

Let's say the draw pile is empty and tiles are added to it because one or more players were eliminated. If someone has the Dragon Tile, take the Dragon Tile from whoever has it and place it at the bottom of the deck. Deal one tile to them, one to tile to the player next to them, one tile to the player next to that player, and so on until everyone has three tiles or someone draws the Dragon Tile.

Answer 2

I agree - this has always bugged me about the Tsuro rules. What we've done is: Whenever a player is eliminated, if there are players who are short tiles, then starting with the player holding the dragon, go around clockwise and give each player who is short one more tile.

I think that works best and spreads out the influx of new tiles on a player death. My concern with giving all the new tiles to whoever's holding the dragon is that it's not fair to the other players who may also be short tiles.

Answer 3

What about buying extra tiles, and stacking them atop placed tiles, when all the first tiles have been placed? This would give a more 3 dimensional aspect to the game, like UpWords gives a 3 dimensional aspect to Scrabble.