Ye Olde Inn

So I've run my first few games in years and a few things came up with me and my players.

The Wizards finite spells mixed with his weak attributes really didn't make him a fun choice for my players.

I generally felt my players needed abit more umpf to get them through as well as just some more things to do in a turn, while at the same time I had an idea to keep the nasty consequences up.

Whenever a player rolls two 6's on the movement dice they pick one Hero Combat Card (Care of Ron Shirtz) if they are the Barbarian, Dwarf or Elf, to be used when they see fit. The Wizard alternatively may reclaim one discarded spell card that they have cast. Each player may only hold up to 3 combat cards at a time, but may discard one in the hand to pick a new one from the pile.

However! If a player rolls two 1's when moving the Evil Wizard picks a Chaos Combat Card and adds that to his hand, being able to hold up to six in total and may discard a card to pick another in the same way as the heroes. Another thought was alternatively the Evil Wizard can choose to permanently remove a discarded spell card from the current quest (Or maybe I could whip up a quick combat card replacement for this effect).

In regards to the above, I also house ruled that the Wizard now has 5 body points but Genie only does 4 combat dice in attack.

This can be interesting. Can you please post a link to these combat cards you're talking about?
I did some extra Wizard's Staffs with the purpose to increase his skills. You can check my topic if interested, but it's still unfinished viewtopic.php?f=34&t=5093

Well sure http://north-american.yeoldeinn.com/cards.php, they are right here on Ye Olde Inn, just scroll past the the character cards.

The Wizard is the strongest payer... it just takes some MIND to figure that out.

Uh well, my players are completely new to the game, so I'll cut them some slack.

Discussion of the wizards strengths or lack thereof have been going on since HQ released, i personaly think he can be quite strong but even when played well hes really just a support character for the others. he only has 3 spells that actually do any damage and in a game where killing monsters makes up a big part of experience, whoevers controlling him can often feel left out. one of the major problems can be players tend to hoard their limited spells until theyre 'needed' and often dont cast them when they should do. overcoming that psycology can make a massive difference to the play experience, but again, it doesnt help you kill the bad guys much more.
My approach to this was to expand each spell group to 9 spells each, making multiple copies of spells like fireball but also adding additional spells with the more powerful spells like genie only having a single copy, then forming a draw deck and each turn the wizard or elf draws a hand equal to the mind pool. some spells were marked active, some passive and some reactive. spell casters could cast 1 active spell per turn and any number of reactive or passive spells. at the end of their turn each spell caster discards any unused spells but may choose to keep up to 1 card from their hand. when the draw deck is empty, the discard pile is shuffled and returned to the draw pile.
this lets spell casters always have a supply of spells to cast without contstantly having access to really powerful spells or casting genie each turn, it also opens up design space for items to buff spell casting or deck manipulation.

Another option for the wizard would be to have a cooldown effect for his spells. Basically, he has to wait X turns before being able to cast a spell again for the first recast, X+3 turns for the second recasting, etc.