Tsuro - Tips & Strategies

As others have mentioned, 2 and 3 player games suffer from an interaction deficit.

However, those low player-count games are just the right speed for preschool-aged kids. I introduced Tsuro to my 3-year-old, and it made a great spatial reasoning game.

When first placing your tokens on the board, no player is allowed to be on an adjacent square of another player, at least one square buffer. Too many times I have seen players play right next to each other and lose immediately. This rule helps against someone losing quickly and having nothing to do.

A strategy that has worked well for me in a two player game is to cut off you oppenent so he/she has a smaller room to maneuver in. This can be done by building a wall with tiles that has paths that make your opponent “bounce back”. This can for example be done with tiles that has a U-turn on the side facing the other player.
If you have a hard time visualizing this, think of the bikes in Tron that created walls where they drove.

* Shuffle the tiles and form a stack. Draw three tiles. Position your stone.

* Play your first tile according to standard rules. Move your stone. Don’t draw a replacement tile.

* Play your next tile, move your stone and draw a replacement, to have two tiles. Repeat as long as there are available tiles. Try to keep your stone on the board!

* Play your two last tiles and move your stone. If you end with your stone on the edge of the last empty board square – it’s OK!

* Now take any tile from the board (except the one your stone is currently on!) and move your stone:
– If you land on the edge of another hole (the one you have just created) – repeat the process.
– If your stone falls off the board – you lose.
– If your stone follows an ‘infinite’ closed path – you win!

Personally, I have a tendency when playing Tsuro to make a safe path with my 3 tiles, adding new tiles to the end and trying to force them to fit. While this isn’t always a bad plan, it has gotten me in trouble. One game I was so focused on moving near another player to mess with him, that when I got to him, he was right at the edge, would move before I would, and, once I realized this, I finally had stopped thinking of my own plans long enough to remember that he had been complaining about how he was about to die.

Long story short, even if you really want to get over to area , make sure you have some control over your own actions once you get there.

Where you place your dragon stone is extremely important. Do not get too close to other players!
I’ve had fantastic games where all the other players ran into each other quickly as I calmly navigated my edge of the board with nobody in sight.

If you own the original Wizkids version of Tsuro you may have wondered about what to do with that dragon tile, since the rules about it aren’t written as clearly as they could have been.

Simply put, all it does is help keep track of who was the last player to pick up a tile before the draw pile ran out.

When another gets knocked out of the game the tiles that were in their hand go back into the empty draw pile. If you’re holding the dragon tile, you immediately place it on the bottom and draw a new one from the top. Then the next player in line draws one tile, and you repeat that until everyone is back up to three tiles in hand or someone draws the dragon tile again.

In the Calliope version of the game the dragon tile was removed and replaced with a duplicate of one of the other tiles.

This game is so perfect as a filler I was struggling to come up with anything that needed to be fixed. I’d say the only problem we had was running into a tie, we tend to like games to only have one winner. So in the event of a tie, I’m thinking something like being able to start pulling tiles from the the outside edge of the board would allow the game to continue. It’s not perfect because they can trace the paths and choose a tile that won’t kill them, however it is interesting because they could choose a tile that would kill the other player.

If anyone has a better solution to ties, please post!

This is a variant rule for Tsuro.

Instead of usual keeping only their own stones on the board the players are required to keep all the stones on the board. A move that makes any stone fall out, or a move that makes any two stones collide is illegal and can not be made. If a player can’t make a legal move he is eliminated, but his stone remains on the board. The last non-eliminated player wins.

This variant can be used by any number of players (2-8) but it is best for 4-6 ones.

One way to slow the game, and, to some degree, decrease the amount of fun, is if players start taking a long time to make their move. Anything over a minute really disrupts the flow of the game, especially before the end of the game where you are seeing if you have any possibility of not dying.

Because of this, my friends have tried playing with a timer, giving a player 60 seconds to lay a tile. At the end of this, any player can grab a tile from their hand, play it as quickly as possible, and continue the game. If they die, they are out, and the game continues as normal.

Harsh? Maybe. Fun? Of course.