Matthew Johnson

The Storeroom allows you to discard cards and draw more, then discard again and get money. As such, this card is incredibly powerful to enable manipulation of your hand with other types of cards, such as the Tunnel from Dominion: Hinterlands. Since Tunnel gives you a Gold whenever it is discarded from your hand, you can start grabbing golds easily. All you need is one tunnel in eight cards (if you discarded your whole hand twice), and you’d be raking in the gold.

Of course, if you didn’t have the tunnel, you could still use the Storeroom to fill your hand with money (discarding everything else) and soon buy enough Silvers or Golds to turn that combination into Provinces. You almost don’t need anything else in your hand to win, depending on what your opponent does.

In way too may games of Power Grid with my friends, we always forget the rule that states: “If, at any time during the game, there is a power plant in the actual market with a number equal to or lower than the number of cities any player has, players immediately remove it from the game and replace it with a new card from the draw stack.” It’s only after a couple of turns that we realize we should have remembered that rule long ago! So, don’t forget about this important rule, or else the game will get frustrating, and when you finally do replace the card, your strategy-minded opponents will agonize over the potential advantage they’ve lost.

Don’t forget in the scoring that you still get 1 point per animal at the end of the game. For the first few games, my wife and I kept getting confused with the bonus scoring, which is similar to “regular Agricola” rules, and we thought that our only points were coming from the bonus scoring on the side of the box. Sometimes, it’s better to just take a whole bunch of sheep if you can, instead of trying to get enough animals of the other types.

The Farmland card is especially handy to turn into Provinces, if you can play it right. Because purchasing a Farmland allows you to trash a card and gain a card costing exactly two more than the one you trash, you can buy a Farmland, trash a Farmland, and get a Province. If you’re able to play this one correctly, the net gain in VP is fantastic. You could also turn a silver into a Duchy… or a Gold into a Province, so don’t be scared away by this card’s higher cost and lower point value.

In this game, if you can connect the big cities (they look larger on the map), you have a chance of picking up many more tickets that you’ve already completed.

The Beggar reaction card allows a player to gain two silvers and put one on top of the deck. However, when playing with attack cards like Knights, which require players to look at the top two cards of their deck, our “house rule” has been to put the silver acquired from the Beggar on top after the attack has been played-out. That way, your silver doesn’t get trashed.

On first glance, Rats look like a worthless card to buy, especially due to the risk of infiltrating your kingdom with Rats. However, try a few games with Rats, and you’ll probably like it, especially when combined with cards like the Death Cart, or even Develop (from Hinterlands).

My favorite strategy is to use the Rats to clean out unnecessary cards, such as Ruins and Coppers, and then use another kingdom card (if possible) to clean up the rats and turn them into something useful.

If you can help it, try not to revealing too much early in the game by placing a second card on a formation unless you know for sure that you can beat the other side. Otherwise, it’s easy for the other player to deduce what you’re up to and then wait for the right cards to beat your formation.