Trash Dominance

[akalcic]

I’ve only played two games so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that cow trashing is dominant. Once you get down to 4 cows and a 5 card hand, you can play all workers every turn and are no longer constrained by cash. I finished at 170 points and over $100. Perhaps with a different train setup it wouldnt be so strong?

[rRTTNn]

The original link is as follows.
https://boardgamearena.com/archive/repl ... s=97155082;

I watched this replay, and it is indeed very interesting. The change in the number of cards removed from the deck can lead to a qualitative change, mainly when the number of cards removed is less than the number of cards in hand. Without considering transportation, and only considering the situation where one wants to draw the same worker multiple times in a round, if the number of cow cards is greater than the number of cards in hand, it can actually be achieved by consuming 1 + X exchange cards. In other words, if there are a sufficient number of workers and exchange cards, it can be realized. Due to the lack of statistical data, based on my experience of playing nearly 100 games, replacing four cards during a single transportation is a good situation (replacing 2 cards with auxiliary actions + discarding 2 cards at other locations). When playing against opponents of similar skill levels, it is relatively rare to encounter this extreme situation.

[Phoxtrot]

I don't know.
I have tried a trashing strategy only once so far. I won but I'm not convinced yet.
Problem is that if you don't play it pure and buy 2 cows, it is immediately less powerful but not buying any cow makes it real hard to place any black corner disc or make points on deliveries.

You also cannot make too many deliveries, especially if you don't have 2a and or 3b to help (or bigger buildings like 4a and 6a of course).
But deliveries are also what helps you discarding 4 or 5 cows at once and what gives you money...

And if the other players are doing deliveries at a normal pace, can you really benefit for long from having very few cows ?
You'll also need money to buy those workers but you will never get 3 gold from auxiliary actions and you also have an extra one time payment of 3$ to unlock the auxiliary action.


Now the rules don't really explain what should happen if you manage to get less cows than your hand size and I think there should be a FAQ about that...

I think I saw somewhere that BGA handles this by not letting you play the exact same worker card twice in a turn but that is not something possible IRL and I personally don't like that solution one bit. Much better for me to forbid players to have less that 5 cows (or something like that). But anyway, that's just my opinion.

[akalcic]

Bga has no such restriction on workers played per turn. You can check out the replay to see for yourself—I played every worker twice per turn many times (start the turn with all workers, play them all, and then get card draw via your action or exchange token to redraw all your workers, play them all again). I ended with over $100 on hand. Cash no longer limits your options, nor does the worker economy.

I doubt it is possible for your opponent to end the game before you achieve getting down to 4 cows. I think I hit it at the start of the 4th cycle? And I was competitive scoring points up to that point. But again, I haven’t played much so I could be wrong on the general pace of a competitive game. And frankly, after breaking the game in this manner, I don’t see myself playing it again.

[Phoxtrot]

I see that in the 2p game where you dominated, you played 27 turns.
In the 2p games I played, we had 19 and 20 turns (stats say 17 and 18 but stat is off by 2)

The official stat average is 20.56 which I guess means 22.56 turns for real.
But that will include 3p and 4p games and I think that 4p games can be longer as there can be more building on the trail to slow you down so the average for 2p games has to be a bit lower than that.

[rRTTNn]

I guess 13-17 turns in average in competitive games.
@akalcic if you play more games, you can find out the power of the trash-card strategy more precisely.

I see that in the 2p game where you dominated, you played 27 turns.
In the 2p games I played, we had 19 and 20 turns (stats say 17 and 18 but stat is off by 2)

The official stat average is 20.56 which I guess means 22.56 turns for real.
But that will include 3p and 4p games and I think that 4p games can be longer as there can be more building on the trail to slow you down so the average for 2p games has to be a bit lower than that.

[swedishwaldo]

There have been other threads about the strength of building 2A on BGG. I noticed that this game did not have that building. Also as you stated the train has bonus tile + aux action at level 2 train. So opponent did not have good option to chain multiple actions together which is normally powerful.
While you made very good use of a level 1 building, since you could discard strong cows and generate quite a lot of money and points.

Just as 2A is strong, which means you must play around it as a possibility, your combo is also powerful and is something that other players should adopt.

[Does-not-play-games]

I agree, this totally breaks the game. I played this strategy the other day with a couple of friends. I didn't even start this strategy until my third go-round, but when I did, my score rose exponentially.

You can buy any worker(s), any cow, any building, and any train action... on every loop!

I ended the game with TEN wild workers, one purple cow, one brown, the best two buildings, and one extra Builder.

I had the worst objectives, worst posts, and nearly tied for worst cattle, yet I won by a good margin from buildings, workers, and money.



I'm not saying my score is the best, but remember I didn't even do this strategy optimally.

Getting 16 points from money alone is just silly. I earned 10 of that on the final turn! Just by doing shenanigans with wild workers, my one engineer, and Exchange Tokens. Discard all of those workers, then use an Exchange Token to get them all back. Repeat three more times. My final turn took like 3 minutes because it's so slow to click "Discard worker" > Click worker > "Confirm" so many times. Thankfully, my friends didn't complain. Just look at my final turn play log:

https://i.imgur.com/FDk8vJj.png

I stalled a bit because I didn't have time in that final round to discard the new Simmental I had drawn, so I wouldn't draw every worker every time I used a token. I could have delivered to the 20 station, but since I didn't have a 6th cow in my deck, when I used the final exchange token, I had to discard one of my cows for the turn. So I lost 5 points by delivering to the 16 spot since I was already in 18. But I earned $50 from worker shenanigans, so it didn't even matter!

your combo is also powerful and is something that other players should adopt

That specific building and train setup doesn't matter. There's no specific combo needed. In your first visit to El Paso, unlock the Trash action. Then you can stop at any building and do an auxiliary action instead of the main action, and it only takes 8 trash actions to get down to 4 cows. Then you get a minimum of $3 every turn from your initial workers. And it only goes up from there as you buy more wild workers. Obviously, if you can Take steps to get auxiliary action in addition to other good actions, you do that. For example: buying a bonus tile that performs a trash action.

If this strategy truly dominates as much as I think it does, this will be a very boring game when everyone adopts it.

not buying any cow makes it real hard to place any black corner disc or make points on deliveries.

Your hand will be 13 value every turn: 5 + 4 + 2 + 2 assuming you keep two starting cows and eventually bought one purple and one brown. If you unlock the permanent cert, or get a bonus tile, you can use your Builders every round and easily hit +4 temporary certs. That's 18 cow value with very little effort. And you really only need 16 each round to deliver to the 16 station multiple times. You can hit 18 or 20 from having additional permanent cert bonus tiles, or the "allow one duplicate" bonus tile plus a second purple cow, or by replacing the last two stating cows with yellow and blue ones. In my game, I delivered to 5, 9, 10, 18, 16, in that order, I think.

Here's my replay: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=649996488

Don't get mad at me if my summary of the game doesn't perfectly match the replay.

[jk49erfan]

Trashing is too strong if the 2nd train slot that provides a bonus tile/auxiliary action is in the game. With this in play it is very easy after 1st delivery to trash most of your cows over the first 6-7 turns of a game. Especially if multiple trash bonus tiles come up.

Turns become ridiculous in these trash games if your cows are under the hand limit. I can discard all of my workers every single turn, again for every exchange tile I can play, and if the exchange 3 bonus tile comes up, I can cycle all 3 times.

This is a game I played recently and scored 92 points in a 17 turn match, and towards the end I think I stopped with the cycling. The board was set up very well for a trash strategy with the train in a favorable location. So even in a normal paced game, mass trashing/cycling seems broken.
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=649919610

I think if the cow deck limit had a minimum of 5, it would probably be enough to balance it

[Does-not-play-games]

Trashing is too strong if the 2nd train slot that provides a bonus tile/auxiliary action is in the game. With this in play it is very easy after 1st delivery to trash most of your cows over the first 6-7 turns of a game. Especially if multiple trash bonus tiles come up.

People keep talking about the train and building layout, but I don't see why it matters. You can stop at any building and do an auxiliary action. After you visit El Paso once you can unlock the trash action, and can just do a trash action at every building. It's 1 turn to get to El Paso because you can start wherever you want, and then 9 actions of trashing after that (to also trash the first Simmental). So that's only 10 turns. A mere 3 turns more than your estimate, and the game is still broken.