Archipelago - Tips & Strategies

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.

After much frustration playing the standard game with the victory point cards hidden, we tried the variant of revealing all of the cards at the beginning of the game for all to see. The pacifist and separatist cards cannot be used in this case, for obvious reasons.

Revealing all of the cards allowed all of us to plan and make better strategic decisions on what resources needed to be collected and saved versus which resources were expendable. This led to a much more enjoyable game, since everyone knew what would actually score points and which conditions would trigger the end of the game.