Machi Koro: Harbor Expansion - Tips & Strategies

If one or more opponents has lots of commercial outlets—Sushi Bars, Hamburger Stands, Convenience Stores, Family Restaurants, and so on, buy a Publisher. This Special card specifically takes money from your opponent for having these establishments. It is relatively cheap and it activates on a roll of a 7.

With the new rule of having 10 unique and random cards in the middle, sometimes you can start the game with very expensive cards or cards that won’t benefit you for a long time. This causes the beginning of the game to drag on.

As a result, we make sure that we have 2 wheat fields and 2 bakeries as 2 of the possible 10 starting cards. It helps the game move a little faster in the beginning, since the payouts will be slightly more. You could pick different cards (convenience stores, and forests for example), but just ensuring that there are affordable cards that have an immediate impact early on is very helpful to get the game going.

There is a problem with the expansion that becomes even more apparent when you add the second expansion(just released) Millionaire’s Row. The problem is to large and unwieldy of a deck of cards with many cards never showing up. We have sort of a house rule wherein we make a 1st and second deck that contains 1/2 of the non-purple cards so that a wider variety of cards can potentially show up. The purple cards are added based on the number of players. 2,3 players add the appropriate number of cards(1 per player). 4 players add 2 per each 1/2 and 5 adds 3 to the first 1/2 and 2 to the 2nd 1/2. This keeps the purples from unbalancing the deck.