How to win at TacTile

[TacTileKing]

Hey gang it’s TacTileKing - a couple tips for winning at TacTile

The basics:
Goal: cross the board diagonally and score both pawns.

Strategy: cards give you free actions - you want those. To use cards after you buy them move on a matching color tile. I.e. you own a red card move on a red tile. To be efficient try to find like a pathway of 2 tile colors from your base to the goal and buy only cards on those colors. Buy as many as you can while also constantly moving forward.

Level 2 strategy (card strategy);
Moves - most important card - buying moves gives you more movement so you can win faster they also help combo your cards. When in doubt buy moves

Gains - second most important card - give you free resources which helps you accelerate faster. This is how you win the late game. You always need gains but if you buy too many at once you might lose before getting to use them. Pretty much start every game with a gain then get a balance of moves and gains for a strong offensive strategy.

Pushes - most difficult card to use well - if you’re new just focus on offense. Pushes allow you to move other people’s pawns - you can move them backward but you can more importantly move them to places they can’t easily activate cards. These jail spots are death and are how you play good defense. Defense is more important in the mid and late game so focus on getting a strong move/gain engine first.

Overdrive:
Overdrive lets you exhaust 2 actions for a free action of your choice. This 2 for 1 is really powerful once you get a few cards - in the early game with more gains you can buy really fast. In the late it lets you convert pushes and gains into moves which helps you score and escape jail. Situationally you can force people into jail by converting into pushes.

[TacTileKing]

Part 3: Advanced Strategy
So in TacTile offense is much simpler than defense (not to say that it’s simple!) therefore advanced strategy revolves around defense. The reason it’s more complex is because good defense involves stopping your opponent with the least effort (so that it doesn’t take away from your own offense). In order to do this you must understand your opponents offensive plan - which becomes complex - you essentially need to play both sides.

How to play good defense:
1. Body block
2. Market block
3. Trap

Body blocking
Essentially this means putting your pawns on your opponents path. Remember how good offense involves finding a 2 color path and following it? Well good defense involves finding your opponents path and identifying bottleneck positions where they must cross a single solitary tile to stay on the path - you then put your pieces on it and stop them. Identify these positions early and race to secure them. It’s a great way to play defense without defensive cards

Market blocking
Essentially this means identify the cards your opponent wants/needs and buy them so they can’t have them. This is a big part of late game strategy and it’s why gains are so critical to win. You can very easily buy your way to victory with a superior gain engine. Focus on buying the moves or overdrive cards they will need to limit their movement.

Trapping
The 3rd best option for defense is the one using pushes? Yes, because it’s so important to maintain progress (tactile is a race!) if you can do 1 or 2 - do those steps first because they don’t take away from your offense potential. That being said trapping is how you win games. Essentially you find tiles that your opponent can’t access the tiles they have cards or at least moves on. You can fully shut down their engine this way. Often you need to body block and push to create traps. The best time to trap is after they score a pawn - you can always trap a solo pawn against an nonparticipatory home tile especially if you have some pushes (or overdrive into pushes) so get ready for that if your opponent is about to score. Look for traps or bottlenecks in the mid game to create the advantage you need to win!

[gregt590]

My effective strategy can be summarized as:
- Get and use as many cards as possible especially
early on, even if it means not advancing pawns across
the board.
- Gains and Moves are most important cards early on.
which ones depends on the colors on the board,
and how easy and soon you can start using them.
- Try to collect cards of the same 2 colors to increase
the ability of activating multiple cards per move.
- Don’t spend too much time collecting resources,
target just the ones you need to Buy your next card.
- Always try to Buy a card each turn, since you are
usually limited to one per turn unless you have
enough activated cards to use Overdrive to do an
additional Buy.
- As the games goes on you may need to start Buying
Push cards to free up optimal paths, slow down an
opponent ahead of you, or help your partner in 4
player games.
- If possible, delay scoring your first pawn until the
turn you can win to maximize your options in Gains
and Moves.
- When playing partners, get Pushes to help him/her
score a pawn first before scoring your two pawns
for the win.
- Don’t forget about using Overdrive to trade two
active actions for any one of your choice. Another
reason to buy lots of cards of the same color.
- Remember that in 3 person games you don’t score
to the opposite corner, you score one pawn to
each adjacent corner.
- Also remember it takes 10 Moves action to score
a pawn to the opposite corner. The more actions
you can execute each turn, the faster this can
occur. This is why you try to activate and use
as many cards as possible every turn.

[BrettsPeeler]

All good advice. Buy lots of cards, move>gain>push, then late game gain is less priority, push approaches equality to move.

Most importantly, increase your options, decrease their's. Don't forget about swap and overdrive!

Solid game design. Kudos the The Bee!

[Kuijpie]

One thing I just learned from TacTileKing: you can use your 2nd base move for overdrive together with 1 action card as well. When using overdrive, click on the black card to select your 2nd base action for overdrive.
Not very intuitive, would be good if the UI will be changed to include this as an option in the action bar at the top.

[TacTileKing]

That’s a good point I’ve reached out to Dave to see if we can get a button added to make it more intuitive

[BrettsPeeler]

That’s a good point I’ve reached out to Dave to see if we can get a button added to make it more intuitive

Maybe if the two base moves were instead a different color cube than red, maybe metallic silver, idk, but something different than one of the 4 color suits (not red/yellow/blue/green), and then maybe on the player aid show overdrive, but unlike the box next to the word for the other actions to place an action cube in, show symbology like 2cubes, or 1 cube + 1 card or 2 cards?

[TacTileKing]

Yea overdrive needs to go on the player aids - it was added late so it’s not on the physical version but it does need some kind of reference. At this point though it would be a lot of work to edit the card functionality so right now just trying to add a button for simplicity

[Kuijpie]

I feel the original version without overdrive can go on forever, but also limits how useful multiple gains are (as without overdrive you can never buy more than 1 card in a turn anyway). Glad we have overdrive in the online version.

[TacTileKing]

Overdrive is definitely an improvement in my mind. The game is much more complex and all the cards see more use. It’s just a little tricky of a rule to wrap your head around but once you get how to use it the game is better in pretty much every way