7 Wonders: Leaders - Tips & Strategies

Leaders can lead others to your overall strategy very quickly. Throw a science leader out and your veteran neighbors will immediately watch the science cards they start passing. Avoid this by placing your leaders out strategically. If your leaders only help in the final scoring, play them before the second or ideally third age.

Of course, if your leaders help in your resource management of certain categories then they must be played early, though the benefit far outweighs the risk of your neighbors knowing your strategy at that point.

Just as much as the Wonder that you receive can determine your path to victory, so can the leaders. For example, in one game, I drafted two Science leaders along with the guy that lets you play your future leaders for free (since I was playing the Wonder that had Science symbols on it). That helped crystallize my strategy and gave me the win. When initially drafting, look at what you get in your opening hand and see which is sympatico with your Wonder. Ask yourself “which one goes well with it?” and draft accordingly. If you have none that will go with your Wonder, get one that is generally helpful (ex. the one that lets you play future leaders for free), failing that, counter-draft. On the other hand, if you get an amazing situation (ex. get “Stevie Wonder” in your opening hand with the single-stage Mannekin Pis), feel free to go with a strategy that suits your personality after you solidify your first strategy (ex. build the Pis with only money). So, bottom line is draft leaders that will go along with whatever Wonder that you get. May seem obvious but sometimes it is the obvious that is overlooked.

Archimedes, Leonidas, and Hammurabi all offer a blanket 1 Resource (player’s choice) discount on Science (green), Military (red), and Civic (blue) structures, respectively. They are very desirable Leader cards, but they can lead to a major imbalance in game play, as someone who is lucky enough to receive one in draft can rack up the right color structures early and run away with part of the game (particularly Archimedes).

As a house rule, we will sometimes remove these three from the Leader deck outright, as there is too high a chance of one of them showing up for draft and the other two being buried in the deck. Drafting Leaders without the blanket discounts makes for a more balanced, less randomly lopsided game.

Imhotep, the leader that discounts your Wonder stages, is in the same category in the rulebook, but it is our group’s feeling that his discount is not nearly as strong as a blanket color discount.

NEVER pass Imhotep. That’s pretty easy, isn’t it?

Imhotep is a huge bargain, allowing you to ignore 1 requirement for each level of your wonder.

Look at the dream scenario – Imhotep with Alexandria (B). The first level requires 2 clay… err 1 clay for you. That should be easy to get. Once you build your first level, you have everything you need to build the second level, and half of what you need for the third!

Imhotep is also great when playing Gizah (B).

We use an alternate draft strategy for the Leaders expansion that allows a lot more flexibility and control of what you get – effectively removing a good bit of the ugly randomness that this expansion adds provided you use the rulebook draft method.

We utilize a “Rochester” draft of the cards, meaning we select the cards that will be available to all players and place them face up in front of everyone. Then we choose someone who chooses first and they get any one card that is face up on the board. The card picks move to the players right and continue until we get to the last player to pick. That player picks twice and the pick order is reversed – so the player who picked first will now be the last person to choose. When it gets back to the original start player he will choose two cards and the pick order reverses again. We do this until all players have 4-5 cards (your choice!) and then begin the game.

It does add a bit of time to the startup of the game but the richness in strategy is well worth it. If you give this variant a try give me some feedback as to how your local players like it compared to the original draft rules.

Have fun!

The rules state that when a leader is discarded for 3 gold and when the spare (4th) leader is discarded after the recruitment phase of the 3rd age, the leader cards are to be placed back in the box.

Instead, we place these cards face-down in the discarded age cards. Whenever players can go through the discard pile, they can choose to play leaders as well. Just like age cards, the person playing the leader card may ignore the cost of the card.