Goa - Tips & Strategies

When first playing any auction game, it is difficult to assign a value to different tiles. As you play more, you’ll start to gain a feel for how much something should be worth.

In Goa the first thing you’ll bid on in your first game will be the first player token (flag). How much should you bid? Should you just ignore it and let someone else take it? It’s tough enough to put a value on the normal tiles, but what about turn order? The key to coming up with some value is based on the extra action you gain by winning the first player auction.

As a quick estimate, the first player token can be valued at what the free action you gain is worth if used for the “tax” (gain income) action. To start, you gain 4 coins by using an action to get income. This means you should be able to safely bid under this number and still come out ahead.

As you play more, you’ll start learning when, and how much, to bid on start player. You will rarely want to buy the first player token just to recoup your money gaining income, but as a first play through, it gives you a target number to use.

Times you definitely don’t want to blindly follow this tip are when paying this money upfront will leave you too poor to buy a tile later in the auction as well as when you want to avoid handing money over to a player that had run themselves out of cash the previous turn. Neither of these should be the case in the first turn of the game, but if you’re new to the game, your tax track will give you a rough feel for a value to assign to the flag.

Track, at least roughly, how much money your opponents have. I watched someone lose a 2 player game of Goa last weekend because he had no idea how much money his opponent had. This is important, especially in the last couple of rounds, because it can help you save some of your money, get more successful bids and possibly earn bonus victory points. Since each person can only make 1 bid on a tile and must bid at least 1 ducat higher, you can either block their bid by bidding exactly what they can bid or you can bid 1 under their ttotal money so they have to spend all their money to win a bid.