Podari

Especially when trying for a stretch number (2, 3, 11, or 12), it’s important to have numbers on the opposite side of the spectrum (preferably of higher probability) as a safety.

People often bust when they’re trying for something like 3, 5 and 7, even though 5 and particularly 7 are significantly higher probability, because the dice roll out as only 4s, 5s and 6s.

A much safer bet is to work on 3, 7 and 9, which has the same probability for the individual numbers, but will account for a wider variety of different dice rolls.

Almost more important than knowing the contents of your army is knowing those of your enemies. While it isn’t necessary to memorize every tile or count which of them have been used (though, if you’ve got the mind for it, it could certainly help!), it can give you a very significant edge if you can anticipate what your opponent might play.

This is true in the general sense (e.g. you should be wary of empty hexes next to an Outpost HQ that are in line of sight of your base; that additional action can be devastating), but also with regards to specific units (e.g. beware the Borgo Net Fighters!).

While there is a great synergy within each group of cards (especially Mechana and Lifebound cards), don’t get so caught up in the “theme” of your hand that you fail to take advantage of the diversity of cards available to you.

Each type of card has a different function and you’ll be much more successful if you keep an open mind to picking up a Mechana construct for nothing but its honor value or picking up a Void card to clear out a little bloat from your deck (when you aren’t going for a Mechana or Void-centric strategy to begin with).

We are MOLOCH. EXTERMINATE!

Moloch have nothing to prove, we have destroyed civilization and your pathetic attempts to attack us are futile.

All we need do is sit in a corner, surround ourselves with metal meat sheilds, push back any attempt to get close to our cold metal heart, fill in the subsequent hole with part of our body, and watch as you break against us.

If our heart is exposed, we are not driven by irrational human aggression to make use of a particularly powerful extension of ourselves elsewhere; nothing is too valuable for use as a fine wall.

We need not attack, you can waste your efforts trying to wear us down, but we will regrow and you will be the only one to suffer.

We may not be fast and we may not be mobile, but we are mighty. We are MOLOCH.

If you can’t get a strong city placement on a commodity to be a viable contender, or even if you can but you need an additional edge, use ports to get those valuable commodities!

A lot of people forget that you can trade four resources for a commodity by default and a three-port can give you even greater flexibility, but, far more powerful than that: if you have a city on brick and a brick port (or wheat with a wheat port), that’s an instant commodity of your choosing any time that tile is rolled!

While I personally prefer the pressure of having to get a knight into play before the first barbarians arrive, it can be especially off-putting to people new to Cities and Knights who don’t know how to make that a priority. Cities and Knights is a much longer game than the expansion-less Catan and it can be super discouraging to start the game having lost your city.

Solution: everybody starts with an inactive knight next to their first settlement.

In my opinion, this makes it too easy to ward off the barbarians in the beginning, but it does speed up the game as you can focus resources on expansion and there’s a greater chance of a tie for Defender (e.g. multiple players getting progress cards).

Each time you don’t get a resource (sevens excepted), you get a welfare token. On your turn following getting a number of welfare tokens equal to your current visible points (e.g. a person with a city, a settlement, a hidden victory point card and largest army would require 5 welfare tokens), you exchange those tokens for a resource of your choice.

This prevents people who get particularly unlucky or don’t get good placement (especially in a four player game) from falling completely behind. The more points you get, the less valuable welfare tokens become!

Sure, you may have missed out on all the high probability tile combinations, but, unlike everyone else, you can make certain your settlements complement one another!

The following placement strategies can be pulled off by anybody, to some extent, but are easiest to do when you are the last person to place your initial settlement:

1) Two-ports! If there are good numbers of a resource and it’s corresponding two-port is adjacent two resources, place directly on the port and maximize your exposure to that resource. This is one way to make use of all the sheep none of the other players wanted!

2) Pair Resource Numbers! You may not get the best numbers for the resources you get, but if you can get key resources (brick/wood, wheat/ore) on paired numbers, it can really play to your favor. For example, if you can get a wood and brick both on the number 4, then every time a 4 is rolled, you’ll get a road.

Meanwhile, Billy-“I’ll-take-all-the-good-numbers”-Bob, might have a 6 on wood and a 3 on brick and end up having to throw his wood to the robber before he ever gets a brick to pair it with.

3) Best for you, worst for them! You get to see exactly what resources the other players require from their second settlements, so, if you can hurt them by blocking off some resource combination they need while still maximizing your own strategic benefit, you’ll be in good standing.

Just remember: you’ve got to play toward your own victory, so don’t hurt your own positioning simply to block somebody else!

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in their initial placement is that they get distracted by the shiny red numbers. Almost more important than these higher probability numbers, is the positioning of the 2 and the 12 (and, to a lesser extent, 3s and 11s).

If any resource is dominated by lower-probability numbers, it is scarce and you should make it a priority to nab any higher probability tile of that resource (even if it isn’t red); you’ll be happy you did when the other players are begging you to trade with them!

One of the most frustrating things in Neuroshima Hex is drawing something super-useful at a time when it is completely useless, like drawing a bunch of action tiles when there isn’t anything on the board yet. A single bad draw like this can really hurt your chances of winning, so here’s an alternative to decrease the chance of a bad draw:

Draw 4 tiles instead of 3 and recycle the extra tile.

Battles end your turn and give your opponents first placement on a newly cleared post-battle board. Unless you have a distinct tactical advantage you could potentially lose, let your opponent be the one to trigger battles, either by playing a Battle tile or by filling the board.

When there’s only one space left on the board…
DO play a tile if it is going to directly benefit you.
DO play a tile if the space is adjacent your base (and could be filled with an attack unit).
DO play a tile if you know the enemy has a tile they could put in that space to devastating effect.
DON’T play a tile just to have an extra tile on the board, whose future use is unknown.

When you have a Battle tile…
DO play it when you can do the enemy base damage at no cost to yourself.
DO play it when you can do the enemy more damage than they can you, but when this tactical advantage could easily be undermined by an enemy play (e.g. a higher initiative unit could easily be placed to kill off your Net Fighter).
DON’T play it when your position is secure but you would take damage in a battle; place more troops to harry the enemy instead or don’t play at all!

There’s a temptation to play everything you’ve got in your hand, because, well, just because you can! Don’t give in to this temptation!!!

Often the best move will be not to move, especially as the board begins to fill up, either because putting down one of your tiles is pointless (because a higher initiative enemy will kill the tile before it can do anything) or because it’s a really valuable tile that could be used to greater effect next turn.

For example, when I’m playing as Moloch, I often hold on to my Air Strike and my Push Backs because there isn’t a large enough clustering of enemy tiles for the maximum benefit of the former, or because I anticipate somebody putting something that damages my base or foils my attacks, in the case of the latter.

My roommate and I often have Ascension showdowns and what we’ve discovered with randomized starting (rolling dice to see which of us goes first), is that the person who goes first has a distinctly higher win rate.

If you think about it, the game ends when the honor runs out, so the first player is guaranteed at least as many turns, but sometimes one more turn than his opponent (giving him a slight advantage).

What we do to even the playing field in successive games is to have the loser go first. This gives the advantage to the person who’s not fairing as well (we’re evenly enough matched that we almost end up switching turns as a result).

One very effective strategy is to keep only a couple simple routes at the beginning of the game and focus all your energy on building longer connections. Your first priority is to get the 8 and, failing that, one or both of the 6s. Then, just stockpile cards and throw down the occasional 4 to block off an opponent, until you have enough cards to play down all your trains on as many 4-connections as possible.

This will end the game well before most route-hoarders can address their cards and, because each 4 is worth the equivalent of an average small-route, it won’t matter as much that you don’t have many points from completed routes. If you can manage longest road while you’re at it, that’s just icing on the cake!

Arkham Horror is a game about uncertainty, insanity and impending doom; embracing this (through a few mild gameplay changes) can really enhance the experience. Here are a few things my friends and I do:

1. Play our characters: Even though we’ve played the game any number of times, we still read our characters’ bios before each game, to remind everybody who it is they’re playing with. We encourage each other to embellish upon our characters, especially regarding how they react to their fortunes in the game.
My first game was all the more memorable, because Sister Mary ended up being a “battle nun,” with a cross and a .45 Automatic, limping by the end from the wounds of successive monster encounters and driven nearly insane as she cleared the streets for my fellow investigators. Now that we have Dunwich, We almost relish getting injury or madness cards for the added color to our characters.

2. Don’t just read the cards, play out the scene: We never give information about the potential rewards or consequences of a choice as another player lays out the scenario. Keeping with the spirit of the game, an investigator wouldn’t really be privy to this information; it adds tension to the decisions the players make and drama to the game.

3. Pass around reading responsibility: Each person’s encounter is read by the person to their left, giving each player a chance to ham it up and embellish scenarios as they see fit (sometimes playing off the character traits/history of the character caught in this encounter).
The person whose turn it is gets to read the mythos phase. The competition to read gets really heated in our games, which makes it easy to keep track of who starts each round as each person is possessive of their right to read their mythos card.

(Looking through the tips, I see there have been a number of like-minded individuals, so while some of this may be redundant, I hope I’m adding a little something in the way we try to embrace the spirit of the game.)

It’s not always practical to do so, but playing by candlelight can really help the creepy vibe of the game. A couple of candlesticks can easily fit in the middle of the board and if you have dim lights or a place to stick more candles nearby, it won’t impede your ability to read cards too much.

Moving your investigators around the streets of Arkham lit primarily by the flickering of candlelight really adds to the atmosphere of mystery and impending doom.

When I start out with the Swamp Orcs, my prime objective is to build a vine wall infrastructure. Nothing is more frustrating to a Swamp Orc’s opponent than to have the board covered in vines, limiting their mobility while improving the Orc’s abilities.

To do this initially, keep your starting units adjacent to your wall. This may leave them exposed to enemy fire, but the enemy will have to kill your troops at the cost of expanding your vine wall.

As the game progresses, this can be used to bully your opponent, as killing you will become increasingly undesirable as it means just another vine wall they have to contend with. If they aggressively approach you, you may be able to kill them and use them for further vine wall growth.

Shamans are especially useful as vine-wall bait, as they can be put down cheaply and get defensive bonuses for being adjacent vine walls. As long as they survive, they can harass the enemy, but if they die, they become another impediment.

If slowly building out vine walls through self-sacrifice is too painful, Splub can be your most important offensive tool. Even if he is immediately surrounded and killed off quickly, if he can land a surprise attack and plant a vine wall behind enemy lines relatively early in the game (especially close to an enemy summoner), it could spell the end for your opposition.

The ability to subsequently spawn troops to directly attack or pressure the summoner (if they’re killed they could potentially further surround the summoner with vines!), can really turn the tide of the battle.

The game ends when the honor runs out and being the person to pro-actively deplete the honor supply can be an effective way of pressuring your opponents and ending the game on your terms.

While being militaristic is one way to do this, you will be limited by what cards show up in the center and could find yourself without any monsters to fight and a hand that isn’t much good at buying things.

A more reliable way to eat up honor is to pick up those Lifebound cards which provide honor (especially Lionheart, though Starchild and Granger are great as well), then fill up the rest of your hand with Enlightenment cards, so that you run through your deck quickly.

You could alternatively use Void cards to similar effect, by slimming your deck rather than running through your excess cards.