Peter Rosenberg

The rules allow players to trade goods and money with each other from the start, so don’t be afraid to strike deals with the other players as an alternative to using action discs on the internal/external market. You’ll be able to save your workers for more important things, as well as reinforce alliances and potentially make more money than you would on undercosted resources like stone.

As a side note to this, don’t spend too many florins on the auction for the order of play; the person who wins will be able to decide the turn order for everyone else, so in most cases it’s more expedient to spend little or no money on the actual auction, then negotiate with whoever wins using your money or other resources.

Cards that are discarded after the reshuffles occur (usually on Turns 3 and 7) will remain in the discard pile until the draw pile runs out again. This usually neutralizes those cards for several turns, since there are only a couple cards that will let your opponent draw from the discard pile. If you discard a card BEFORE the reshuffle occurs (say, by spacing them on Turns 1 or 2), you aren’t doing yourself much of a favor, because they will be shuffled back into the draw deck on Turn 3, and your opponent could easily draw and play them.

When it comes to game-changing events (like the Dreaded Ds, Decolonization and Destalinization), you can never be too careful.