Opinions wanted - discarding with a play clue if 2 clues well be needed next round?

[Ant Stewart]

I'm curious what peoples thoughts are on this situation.



The player to left (blue) has a free discard, but then 2 critical cards on chop.
I have just been given a play clue on reds.
There are no tokens.

After blue discards, both yellow and I will need to save the 2 chop cards. And there are two options for that, yellow clues 4s, and then I either clue greens or 5s.

My thought though is that it is obvious to yellow that by his turn we require 2 clues, therefore IMO I have a forced discard to get the first clue token and then blue will discard the 1 to get the second.

If I were to play my play clue, then there would only be one clue token by the time that we got round to yellow.

So in this position, I discarded and discarded my chop card which turned out to be multi 5.

Yellow then said I should not have discarded chop since I had a play clue. And that I should have played and hoped that the card that was drawn got us out of this mess.

My logic was that they could see the double chop situation as well as I could, so would know that I had to discard to have enough clues, so they should have saved my chop if it was critical as I would not be able to respond to a play clue. And relying on luck on the card being drawn was not a valid strategy at that point.

So was I wrong to discard with a play clue in order to prevent a situation in the future that might not occur?

The game is flams, 6-colors, 10 cards, no avalanche or black power.

[Blacktango]

Hi, thanks for sharing

This is a very tough situation, but nothing is critical yet.

Since Blue has no reason to discard this turn, you don't have a strong reason to risk a blind discard.
Also, Yellow has chosen to use the last token in this situation (instead of discarding and getting more token), so their clue MUST be critical to be given now, which should prevent you from discarding.

A good reason to discard, despite the R clue, would be if Yellow had no playable and a critical chop. Then your discard would be necessary to get back the token that Blue needs to give the save clue.

As for Blue's hand, you can deal with it next turn.
Maybe they will draw an M3 and the problem will be solved. Or they may draw a 1, a 2 or a Y, which you can clue to delay the chop discard.
If they don't, you will clue G, and let them bomb the G4. No big deal, bombs are made for such cases.

However, if you have no card marked R, then Yellow should bluff your newest R card by cluing M on Blue's M4.
Then Blue will discard the M1, then Yellow will discard the B2, and you will have a token to save Blue's 5s.

[Romain672]

You like long posts? You have nothing to do in the next 10 minutes? I have the solution! Grab some popcorn, read my post, and enjoy!

In both hgroup and bga the conventions said (so most of the time) to just manage the problems later on, and deal with the actual threat now.

Is that good? It's simple at least, and it has the advantage of being able to make the right person discard.
I think you should take the pov of the previous player to understand the advantage of it. I will show you some situations, in increasing level of complexity:
There is no globally known cards: nothing is clued on the board.
In all situations: 1 clue left. Played: r0 b1 g2. Discarded: r4 and b4. All cards are clueable directly.
Make sure to understand my position with every situation before going to the next, there will be many callback to previous situations, and you could be lost if you goes too fast.

Situation #1:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-x-y5
Cathy: x-x-x-x-b5
If you save Bob, then Bob is stuck and must trust that Cathy will clue something in Bob's hand, which is really bad.
If you save Cathy, then y5 is discarded.
So you discard.

Situation #2:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-x-g1
Cathy: x-x-x-x-b5
Here, you clue Cathy's b5 to make Bob discard g1 which is trash. Everything work.

Situation #3a:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-x-g3
Cathy: x-x-x-x-b5
Here, you don't want to lose g3. So the instinctive and safe play is to discard, hope g3 survive and Bob clue b5.
But now look at what happen if you add a critical's card in Alice's hand:

Situation #3b:
Alice: ?-?-?-y5-?
Bob: x-x-x-b1-g3
Cathy: x-x-x-x-b5
So here, you discard, and then Bob is back in situation #1. So Bob will discard that playable g3.
So instead, in situation #3a, you could decide to clue g3. That will make Bob in a situation where he must save b5, and he has no clue left. So he should discard, but that time it will be his second chop.
In Cathy's pov, that will be a scream discard, since Bob discarded for no reason instead of playing, and that should make Cathy save her chop.
That play is far better with a b1, but is more complex, but is done to keep g3 alive which is a pretty good card, especially with g4 is visible on the board (from Alice's pov, the player who choose the line).
But if you see that many players hold critical cards, and you try to survive, you could choose a safer line to give more time to the team, plan to lose g3 and discard. If g3 survive, you could be in the same position next turn.

Situation #4:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-g3-x-x
Cathy: x-x-x-r4-b5
I don't think bga manage that situation nicely. You got two critical cards to save, and have no way to save both of them. And that's what you was scared of.
And here that start to be extremely situational, and we talked about a similar situation on a previous post, you can:
- create a bomb by clueing Cathy
- give a known trash clue to Cathy
- discard as Alice, and if you have any playable in your hand which can be clued, Bob will be able to save b5 (if Alice's chops are safe), and Cathy should clue one of them, especially if Alice and Bob discards are few useful or trash.

Note that the experience of players is important. Cathy can most of the time see that players are discarding very agressively, on a normal situation that should mean that their chop is useful but not critical, but on emergency situations, that could be the case.

Situation #5:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-x-r5
Cathy: x-x-x-r4-b5
Here, that's really bad. If you clue r5 in Bob's hand, Bob will discard, and Cathy will have one clue that you can hope she will use. If she don't, the game will be lost.
If you clue b5, r5 will be discarded.
If you discard, Bob will have two clues, and from his pov, he will be in position #4. But we said that Bob could create a bomb by clueing Cathy which look really nice if it's available. So that line can be pretty good, but it really depend how likely Bob will clue Cathy.
After the bomb, As Alice you would discard, Bob will save the other card. Cathy will discard, Alice will save Bob, Bob will discard, and we should be back in track.
Note that both clues can work. And your decision could be depending of which player between Bob and Cathy got bad cards in their hand.

Situation #6a:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-x-g3
Cathy: x-x-r4-b5-g1
And here we are closer to your situation.
If you clue g3, then g3 should play, g1 should discard, and we are in situation #4, which isn't great. But that makes a g3 played.
Again, that clue isn't mandatory, that should depend a lot of the board.

Situation #6b:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-x-x-r5-g3
Cathy: x-x-r4-b5-g1
You clue g3, and after g3 is played and g1 is discarded, you are back in situation #5, which could lead to situation #4, which can be fine situationally.
But the much safer line here is to not clue g3. Note that if you discard, you got a risk to have another critical But the more critical you add to Bob and Cathy, the less likely your hand is important. On the contrary, if it's the only problem, and Bob and Cathy got 5 trash cards, then your chance to have some critical increase, and spending a bomb to resolve that situation look great in many cases.

Situation #6c:
Alice: ?-?-?-?-?
Bob: x-g3-x-b4-g5
Cathy: x-x-r4-b5-g1
And finally potentially your situation. Here it's the same situation than #6b except clueing green is forced since both players got two criticals cards.
But the more criticals you add, the less likely the situation arise.
But still here, you can make it work, as we have said, Alice clue green to Bob, and we are in situation #6b.


Note that I focus here on the point of view of Alice. When you take Bob's pov, he should himself play depending of Cathy and Alice's hand. If Alice's hand is problematic, he will be likely to discard, and make Cathy clue Alice. Then Alice can discard. And if the game isn't lost by Bob's discard, Bob is in the same situation, except he managed to save one critical card in Alice's hand.
The cases where three players got a critical card in chop are extremely hard (or are from a part of the game with 8 clues / one player locked, so one player which have only clued cards and have no finesse position anymore), and rarer with better players.
Lots of things are situationnal, and if you allow players to discard because one player got two criticals cards in hand, you make players less predictable, and lose the option to give during the next 5 turns one clue to Cathy that she can use to resolve problems in Alice and Bob's hand.
Like I said previously, with better players, you are better on seeing that your hand is extremely valuable and you shouldn't discard.

[NCAAbbUmpire2021]

People seem to be ignoring that yellow (top/north) messed up here. Can we just call a spade a spade? Since we can see red 5 and no red 3 or 4 in discard, then Ants chop card that was splashed can not be critical. Useful maybe but not critical.

A double save was coming and the red clue MADE ants hand a critical chop card. Someone mentioned how difficult it is when multiple people have critical chops, but clueing red made that happen.

Yellow/north/top should have bluffed the red card out with m4 or simply just discarded.

I’m not sure when the 4s in yellow/north hand were clued, if it was a chop save they know their chop 4 is playable.

Some people can not stand to not clue. With several tokens, no problem, with low tokens, you have to ask yourself if it’s needed to give that clue now. They probably were so excited to clue red 2/3 they didn’t give a single thought to what comes after .

Did ant have to discard? This game preaches trust, I’d trust my red clue didn’t put us in a bad spot rather than rely on dumb luck of the draw.

Someone mentioned intentional bomb with green, that’s a temp fix bc they will again have a double save and not everyone would “then play the other green” the next round as most don’t follow a bomb with another

[Romain672]

I want to add that I give my own answer.

I think on bga, if you want lower winrate (long term), safer play, and less mistakes, I fully agree that north should never give that red clue.

[Blacktango]

Well, we don't know whether the R chop card was already marked R or if the R clue from Yellow had turned them both R.

But if no card was marked before the clue, sure a bluff would have been the right move.

[NCAAbbUmpire2021]

Well, we don't know whether the R chop card was already marked R or if the R clue from Yellow had turned them both R.

But if no card was marked before the clue, sure a bluff would have been the right move.

This wasn’t avalanche , so bluff would have been right play regardless whether the other red was already marked , but you are correct we don’t know if it was or not

[Ant Stewart]

Thanks all for the answers! It's really helpful.

In this situation the red on chop was already marked (a splash from a previous clue), but yeah when I looked back on the replay I was surprised that multis weren't bluffed as that does seem like the obvious answer for yellow as it causes the same cards to be played in my hand, and it solves the double discard.

I had missed the bomb on green as an option. I agree that would have been a better last resort before a blind discard.