Andrew Chatfield

Making use of the pillaging power to gain an extra point for each time you conquer a non-empty region you can play a particularly aggressive game.

At the beginning of each turn when you collect your tokens to begin conquest, abandon all of your territory and take all of your tokens in hand, then find the weakest race and begin to charge headlong into their territory. Each territory you capture from that race will be worth 2 points at the end of the turn rather than 1.

In addition to scoring 4, 6, or even 8 points a turn from your active race, you will still be scoring a few points from whatever race you have in decline.

This will also cause your opponents to consolidate their defenses in fewer territories in order to defend against you and thus score fewer points per turn. Once all of your opponents are closed up in small, well defended areas and you have reaped many points from your pillaging, feel free to go into decline.

Bridge changes up the buy phase quite a bit for people that are not familiar with it. It gives +1 buy, +1 coin, and reduces the cost of all cards by one.

Many people focus on the reduced cost feature of the card and forget about the +buy. Since Bridge reduces the cost of all cards, it becomes more valuable the more cards you buy.

If you have $4 and play bridge, you gain +$1 and all cards are reduced in cost by one. If you bought a single cards, say a gold, your total purchase value for the turn is $6.

However in the same situation if you make use of the + buy and instead bought a $4 and a $3, perhaps another Bridge and a Silver, you total purchase value for the turn is $7.

If you find your fellow players are not in a trading mood, then take advantage of the 2:1 ports.

First evaluate which resource you can likely generate the greatest surplus of. These will likely be resources that are under the 5,6,8, or 9s.

Then, judge the position of the 2:1 ports. Build your first settlement on the port that is both situated to trade in your chosen surplus resource and will likely generate it’s own resources. (Don’t pick a port on a 2,3,11, or 12 unless absolutely necessary)

Build your second settlement on whichever corner of the hex you chose in step 1 that you feel will bring in the most resources over-all. If you can put it on a corner that will generate your chosen surplus resource on two different rolls, great!

In a best-case scenario, your port settlement is built on a hex that generates your chosen resource and your inland settlement is nestled between two hexes of the same resource and all of those hexes are between 5-9. This will likely not be the case in most games, but try to get close.

You are now positioned to generate a lot of a single resource and trade them in at a 2:1 rate to get exactly what you need for your future construction.

As the game progresses, you will want to build further settlements and cities around your resource hexes to maximize the number of cards you have available to trade in.

With this strategy, the other players will undoubtedly try to put the robber on your most profitable hex so keep in mind that you will want to purchase a good number of development cards in order to always have a knight available to clear your hexes.

Remember that scoring small points quickly and often can add up.

Have an extra meeple? Have a tile that could close up an easy 2 or 3-tile city? Grab it, score it, and get your meeple back to do it again.

While you steadily take in a stream of small-point scores, you can place tiles that make your opponents big-point features difficult if not impossible to finish.

Give everyone playing the game a hand in selecting what cards will be played with.

Starting with an empty table, each player in turn gets one of three options.
1.) Select a new cards to add to the field.
2.) Remove a card from the field.
3.) Pass.
Once there are ten kingdom cards on the field and each player has agreed on the cards in play by successively passing, then add the rest of the cards to the field (Victory Point cards, Money, etc.) and begin play as normal.

Turn corrupted quiddity dice into a game of hot potato.

Make it so that when you cull a corrupted quiddity die from your pool, it can not be placed back in the wilds, but instead must be given to another player’s used pile.

Best done with players that can handle a bit of good-hearted, back and forth sabotage in their game.

If Steward is available, buying one on your first or second turn can be a great investment. You can use it to trash estates and coppers out of your deck early on, and when those are gone it changes roles to be your choice of a silver or +2 cards.

Occasionally, my house will play with a single d12 die instead of the regular 2d6. Using this rule, you move the thief on a roll of 1 or 7.

This evens out the number tiles to make them all equally attractive rather than 6 and 8 having an advantage over the other numbers while maintaining the same chance of rolling the thief.

Our house rule is that we always play to 20 points, but we add an extra creature and spell card into play for each extra player beyond 2.

So 2 players is the standard 7 creatures, 3 spells.
3 players gets 8 creatures, 4 spells.
and 4 players gets 9 creatures, 5 spells.

My house likes to replace 1 basic quiddity die in each players starting bag with 1 corrupted quiddity die and put the replaced basic quiddity in the wild to be available for purchase. This way the corrupted dice are in play no matter what creatures or spells come into play for a particular game.