Board Game Arena

Looking at the rulebook, I realize now that another player must have played a villager that required a padlock payment of two gold to a carpenter, and I was the only player with a carpenter.

In an otherwise fine tutorial, it wasn’t explained why the carpenter’s coins jumped from two coins to four coins. Originally, building the poulterer unlocked 2 gold to the carpenter. But then later in the tutorial, the carpenter’s gold jumped to four gold for no apparent reason. Was this an error in...

It’s been fun learning the two player game and its nuances. For next season, I’m going to vote for the three player game just for a change in perspective. It would be nice to alternate between two and three player games for each new season.

Good advice there from ErikLavin. I would add that it’s good to know the distribution of cards of each civilization. There’s a file on Boardgamegeek. This will help you know a little better what to expect to appear after you draw from a side deck. Each civilization has a somewhat different character...

On the Boardgamegeek page for this game, there’s a file called card distribution that lays out the card distribution for the center deck and for the side decks. It’s very useful to know in terms of what’s more likely for each civilization.

There are probably more battles because more people are realizing what a dominant strategy it is. The other dominant strategy is drawing a good mix of green cards, but I often will choose a permanent army card rather than a green card. Keep in mind though that sometimes there are fewer battles than ...

Part of understanding the dynamics of when to draw from the side decks versus the central decks is know the card distribution differences between the different civilizations. There’s a file of this somewhere on Boardgamegeek. So Egypt is a little more likely to reveal gold and cats while Babylon and...

I wouldn’t say completely random. There are many subtleties one learns over time about understanding the pace of the game, what to recognize in different situations, and when to draw from the side decks or the central deck. Yes, luck can quite often determine who wins, but in the arena games I see s...

I think it’s the sort of game where you often can’t do much about losing by two points. What decides the game is usually something that happens earlier. So knowing the score near the end I think leads to a longer waiting time as people take more time to make decisions and leads to a less climactic e...

There are also more important things to look at in terms of tactics and strategy, and a precise running score is just distracting.