Reply: The Castles of Burgundy:: Strategy:: Re: 2-Player Lessons From Boiteajeux (ongoing project)

by random user

One thing you don't talk a lot about is how far along the game you are, and that's a significant part of the game, especially 2p.

A silver mine the first round will net you two extra actions as 4 silver = 2 extra pulls. It also puts you in front to be able to score the large tile bonus. On top of that you can often complete the region which is 10 points.

A castle is usually slightly less good -- it gives you one extra action but more flexibility, so played right it can often be used to deny your opponent a tile they really want -- but on most boards will still score 10 or 8 points if/when you complete it in the first/second round.

Taking each of these early also potentially denies points to your opponent. If your opponent can't get a silver mine the first round, then the max region bonus they can get is 8 instead of 10.

Both tiles get significantly worse as the game progresses because the bonus for completing regions goes down (and of course you get less silver for your silver mines).

Ships are important, but there is a lot more nuance to them. If you are going first and grab one ship but don't play it, now your opponent faces a problem. If they go ahead of you early in the round, then you can play yours afterwards and re-gain the lead into the next round. But if they don't play their ship, then you retain the lead for most of the round.

This gets more complicated if there are ships in the black market, and these can often be worth getting, especially if tile 15 (which is often a 30 point swing if not more and should always be kept top of mind) has already been taken.

Still I agree that ships are very important in 2p, especially if tile 15 is still missing.

I disagree that regions (which I think you refer to as cities?) are a bad deal. Played correctly, you should almost always be able to play 30 tiles. The max potential actions is (unless I'm forgetting something):

50 actual actions
12 actions from building tiles
4 actions from 4 castles
5 actions from silver mines (in theory 6 is possible but extremely unlikely, especially against a good opponent)
1/2 action from your starting silver

That's 71.5 possible actions, and you only need 60 actions to place 30 tiles. Of course you usually aren't going to be able to get all 71.5 actions -- you might need a boarding house or be forced to play a watchtower, or be forced to get 2 workers. You might not get the castles and/or silver mines in a timely manner.

You'll also need to designate some actions for shipping, but those are only count as half as you get one silver back each time.

Even if you find a strategy where you ignore silver mines and castles, playing smartly you should be able to place 29 tiles. Near the start of the game (for sure before the end of the first round) you should try to envision which of the 6 or 7 tiles you are going to leave empty by the end of the game. Maybe it's fill everything except animals, or everything but knowledge tiles. Maybe it's leave 3 castles and 3 silver mines. But you should do it in a way that is city-efficient.

Of course you need to be flexible depending on how the game goes. Maybe you were going to leave 6 animals but you needed to defend against your opponent's herd by picking a tile worth 12 points to them. Then it's time to readjust what you want your end board to look like. But having a clear idea early of what you want your end board to look like helps you not miss region points that you should be able to get just by playing.

The last thing I think is really important is by the mid-game to make sure to count your available actions. If you have 24 actions left and need to play 12 tiles, you have no room for error (and probably need to re-consider your end board unless you have tons of workers as you'll probably miss by at least one or two actions getting workers). If you are short on actions you have no room to get distracted picking up something of only marginal use. I see a lot of players think they can do too much, when a quick count of their available actions would show that they don't have enough actions for finish everything they want to.