Wow, this is really great. Sam, you've already set a really high bar with the content of your strategy videos, and now inviting the top player of a game for additional comments sets a new standard! Please keep doing that. Love your content - thanks so much!
Very nice content. My tip would be to do the biggest region of your board in the last round. Big regions are effective but not effective to rush. For example in the board of the video i would aim to get the building 6 and/or the pasture 4 but in the later rounds. In my opinion blue is also a bit overrated, if one opponent commits to it, ie takes 2 boats in round 1 I wouldn't bother too much with it anymore and go for animals instead. Animals are most efficient point scorers and if you start em early enough hard to completely deny.
Hehe, I used to think similarly about the boats. All board-dependent of course. What changed my mind is the quality of tiles that you give up by being complacent with 2nd player. You'll never get the best yellow tiles from the black market (tiles 15 and 25 in particular, huge amounts of points for selling goods). Then on top of that your opponent can basically copy what you do, but better. If you commit to Cows early, good luck ever seeing a tile with 4 Cows on it. And you'd better finish all your animals by stage D or it's likely you'll have the 6th one you need blocked at the start of the last stage. If you can stay within a couple of boats you can at least pressure the 1st player to take a boat plus a great tile, as opposed to just taking 2 great tiles, at the start of each stage.
Good general advice. already knew all of them but most of them from PistolStar with the complete guide he wrote on BGG.. Still something i need to read more deeply as he explains all the yellow tiles and many expert advice
I don't even know the rules to this game but I feel I could learn it better from a tutorial on RU-vid via BGA than from some how to play video from 10 years ago
I agree with Sam. It isn't that complicated. This How to play-Video is right to the point and it only takes 11 minutes to watch => ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zxUDLaTsV14.html On BGA you have the in-game tooltips to tell you with a short text, what a tile does, as well. There's also a scoring table. It is a well-made implementation for beginners. I am just thinking, that it could make sense to play your first game in turn-based mode. So you have time to fully comprehend each tile and each of the 4 available actions. You can also undo all your actions on BGA. So you can for example, take a church, place a church and see the churches effect in-game and then undo it and try something else, if you like to :) When you place a church/castle/ship/whatever, it even tells you your (bonus) action right away and highlights with circles all the available options for your (bonus) action. Once you get familiar with each tile and the rules, the game becomes extremely fun and rewarding to play :)
He is self-admittedly slow. It's that extra attention to detail that allows him to maintain such a high win rate. But it is something he has said he is working on 🙂
