Bruges - Tips & Strategies

Of course Threats can ruin your day, but there are times when you can make them work for you. Have that 0 VP character with the one-shot power alreay spent? Is it going to score you more points because of a laurel character? If not let the plague carry him/her off. Don’t want to loose a house to the fire? Build one extra canal to eat the red threat tokens and carry about your day.

I make sure to only worry about the threats when they will hinder me too much. There are plenty of ways to get rid of the markers without tossing an otherwise useful card at the problem.

I equate this to letting certain Crisis cards “auto-fail” in Battlestar Galactica. Sometimes your resources are better spent at the expense of something else.

About halfway through my first game of Bruges I picked up on a pretty important overriding strategy for card selection that has served me quite well – I’ve won around 80% of the games I’ve played, most of which were 4-player and have included several different board-game enthusiast friends who don’t go down easily.

It’s really pretty simple, and possibly pretty obvious to some people: think about what you’ll need to accomplish during the next round and draft your cards to that end.

At the beginning of the game you’ll have a worker of every color, so getting buildings out will be easy. During these rounds, get as varied a spread of card colors as possible… this will guarantee that you’ll have a card that can produce a high amount of guilders. Any cards that will give you 5 or 6 guilders should be used for that purpose in the first couple of rounds, regardless of how much you like the person on the card. Place buildings and people with the remaining, lower-guilder-producing cards during these rounds.

By round 3 or 4, your initial supply of workers will be gone or severely depleted. At this point, you’ll want to draft several like-colored cards. If you can get 3 cards of the same color in your hand you’ll be set… one of those cards will produce 2 workers of that color, and the other 2 cards can couple with those workers to become buildings. If you’ve built your guilders sufficiently during the first 2 or 3 rounds, you’ll easily be able to get people into those buildings immediately.

In short, if you’ll need guilders during the next round get a spread of as many different colored cards as possible during your drafting phase; if you’ll need to get houses out, make sure you get 2 (and preferably 3) of the same colored cards. I’ve actually openly shared this strategy with the people I’ve played with, but they fail to implement it as well as I do. Their fault is that they fall in love with the people on their cards and refuse to play them for guilders or workers. Don’t do that. Shape your play around the people you happen to get out rather than changing your strategy to get particular people into play.

One important caveat: if you have 2 threat markers of any color, make sure you draft a card of that color just for that purpose. Handling most threats trumps your other needs.