A friend mentioned a possible easy tweak of the Saint Petersburg rules: just pay out the buildings once again at the end of the game (perhaps disallowing observatory/debtor's prison except for taking the 1 VP).
This has two possible advantages:
- It could enable a viable blue-heavy strategy to compete with the as-many-aristocrats-kinds-as-possible strategy.
- The trading card phase at the end would actually matter for blues as well as aristocrats.
Can anyone shoot holes in the idea? I'm curious for people to try this out and report how it goes.