Add your own Tips, Strategies, & House Rules! Vote for tips that you think are useful.
Tips & Strategies (26)
Add your own Tip, Strategy, or House Rule
You must be logged in to add a comment.
- 01Galaxy Trucker
- 01Mansions of Madness (1st ed)
- 01Navegador
- 00King of Tokyo: Halloween
- 00Spirit Island: Branch And Claw
- 00Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
- 00Twilight Imperium (4th Ed.)
- 00Thunderstone Quest
- 00Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon
- 00Nemesis
- (updated once every hour)
- Check out our users' favorite games!
- (152) 7 Wonders
- (149) Dominion
- (144) Pandemic
- (135) The Settlers of Catan
- (120) Carcassonne
- (115) Ticket to Ride
- (97) Small World
- (96) Munchkin
- (92) Arkham Horror
- (91) Forbidden Island
- (# of user reviews, updated every 12 hours)
- 3 Maracaibo
- 3 Mansions of Madness (1st ed)
- 2 Root
- 2 Formula D
- 2 The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game
- 2 Port Royal
- 1 Exploding Kittens: Streaking Kittens
- 1 Everdell
- 1 Arkham Horror
- 1 Peloponnes (4th ed)
- (# of times played, updated every 12 hours)
- see all new games >
-
Hasty Baker
19-Aug-24, GoChuckle -
Mythic Quests: The Card Game
7-Nov-22, BoardGaming.com -
Mythic Dungeon Crawler – A Solo Card Game
27-Sep-22, BoardGaming.com -
Lost Ruins of Arnak
28-Dec-21, Czech Games Edition -
13 Monsters
4-Dec-20, Twisted Stranger B.V. -
Forgotten Waters
4-Dec-20, Plaid Hat Games -
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set
18-Nov-20, Paizo Publishing -
Unlocking Insanity
5-Oct-20, Petersen Games -
Planet Apocalypse
5-Oct-20, Petersen Games -
Marvel United
1-Oct-20, CMON, Spin Master Ltd. -
Draconis Invasion: Wrath
23-Sep-20, -
2 Minute Dino Deal
5-Aug-20, Petersen Games -
Mythic Challenge: The Card Game
2-Aug-20, BoardGaming.com -
Viscounts of the West Kingdom
27-Mar-20, Garphill Games -
Glamazons
14-Feb-20, Prettiest Princess - see all new games >
- see all upcoming games >
-
Gravity Warfare
2018 Q4, Smart Iguana Games -
BANG! The Dice Game – Undead or Alive
2019, dV Giochi -
Hasty Baker
2019, GoChuckle -
Penguinramids
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Origami: Legends
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Decktective: Bloody-red roses
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
BANG! The Duel: Renegades
2019 Q4, dV Giochi -
Buy It Or Don’t
2019 Q4, Binks Games -
Four Levels
2019 Q4, Four Level Productions -
Unlocking Insanity
2020, Petersen Games -
High Noon
2020 Q4, High Noon Inc. -
Quantified
2021, Quality Beast -
High Frontier 4 All (4th ed)
2021 Q2, Ion Game Design, Sierra Madre Games -
Legends of Sleepy Hollow
2021 Q2, Dice Hate Me Games -
Game of Energy
2021 Q2, Ninex Games - see all upcoming games >
Recent News
- New Game Adds – What Do You Want?
9-Feb-22|13 comments - Winter Gaming and Gift Giving
17-Dec-21|11 comments - Games Added – Dec 4
4-Dec-20|8 comments - The holiday shopping season is upon us!
30-Nov-20|5 comments - Technology, table top games and the coming holidays
19-Nov-20|8 comments - Support Mythic Kingdoms – Get BG Rewards
11-Aug-20|10 comments - Tournament of the Mythic Kingdoms: Illustrated Playing Cards
1-Jul-20|15 comments - How have games been helping you, your family and friends?
10-Apr-20|12 comments - Games Added (March 27)
27-Mar-20|7 comments - What are you playing during your Stay-At-Home?
27-Mar-20|13 comments
Tsuro is all about tactics, but their are a few strategies you can try heading into the game. I’ve already suggested “turtling”, and one strategy while avoiding other players is to create a wall. It is important to note this is not going to be possible with 6-8 players, but it can be done with 5 or less, especially if they are all attacking each other. I liken this to a similar strategy in Blokus… where you cut off everyone else and just work within your own area. Remember, the goal is to be the last one standing. If you have enough tile area to outlast the rest of the players… you win!
Strategic Tip ~ Create a wall and watch the rest parish outside your fortress.
Granny winks.
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.
You must make movement sound effects.
Could be space ship sounds, car sounds, motorcycle sounds, even galloping sounds are allowed. But you can’t move you piece without making sound. Trust me, this should have been in the rules.
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.
Tsuro is one of those games where there is always several aggressive people trying to knock everyone off. If you can, avoid placing your stone near anyone (difficult with 6 or more players, I know). Then, proceed to avoid everyone the best you can. I have found that most games have people knocking each other off the board before I even cross someone’s path. Many times this leaves them in a bad place as well. Then, you move in for the kill. Yes, you turtle for while, then you get aggressive. If you watch the paths carefully, you can catch people by surprise, because you’ve been avoiding them. This leaves them vulnerable. Tsuro is all about tactics.
Tsuro Strategic Tip ~ Playing possum is totally awesome!
Granny grins.
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.
Tsuro is an effortlessly light game but it gets old fast. Here’s a variant we use to perk things up:
Designate one or two wormholes using tokens at the edges of the broad. Any tile placed that would normally cause a player to fly off the board instead instantly transports them to the other opening of the wormhole. One pair is enough to make things interesting, and two is probably a reasonable limit. If you are a jaded Tsuro player, experimenting with wormholes can add a new … dimension … to the game.
One necessary additional rule: Making an infinite loop causes the loss of your piece!
* 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!
1. Prepare a Tsuro board and put all the tiles face up nearby.
2. Place all 8 player stones on the starting positions of your choice.
3. Choose the order the virtual players will take their turns. You can not change this order afterwards.
4. Play subsequent turns of the virtual players. You can choose any available tile you want for each move.
5. End up with one square empty and all 8 stones on the board – in an eightfold draw!
Good luck!
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.
The more symmetrical a tile is, the fewer ways you’ll be able to play it. If a tile is double-symmetrical (meaning it looks exactly the same no matter how you rotate it) get rid of it early. Examples include the #, the * and the all-u tiles.
Some tiles are symmetrical along a single axis, meaning that they’ll work two different ways. These are less dangerous, but you should still strive to find tiles that allow you to connect the most ways.
I also like to keep at least one tile with a u-turn on it.
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.
I try my best to stay inside the first two rows at the start of the game only moving inward when there are no other choices. Let others struggle over the middle and bump each other off.
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.
You want to stay as close to the center as possible. If you’re on the outside edge it really limits your options on where you can move.
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!
As Tsuro players are required to place their tiles on the free board square adjacent to the position of their respective stones, it is ultimately dangerous to end your turn at the edge of a square that will soon be filled by any of your opponents. Avoid such stone positioning as much as you can. If you do so your stone will most probably be thrown out the board or collided with another stone when your foe makes their move.
Yet if someone else carelessly plays that way look whether you can eliminate their stone during your next move (preferably colliding it with another stone – this gets rid of two enemies at once).
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.
Look for ways to block off an area with 6 or more free spaces in it – more if you’re playing with 2 or 3 players. This way you can bide your time while the other players go toe-to-toe in the rest of the field.
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.