Advanced players not placing stones til end?

[kinzie_k]

I've noticed a few times that some players (and many of them tend to be more advanced by rank) will play their game and not place many of their cubes til the final turn.

Is there some reason for this? Is it to keep flexibility in case they want to use a token a with a different animal card than it originally seemed? Is it to throw off the opponent to make it seem like they haven't gotten many animal cards? Is there some other reason?

[Azoken]

Is there some reason for this? Is it to keep flexibility in case they want to use a token a with a different animal card than it originally seemed?

This right there. There is no gain to place your cubes right away, but there is a cost, so why would you place them ? The only reason to place cubes is when you have already 4 animals so you finish one to free a spot.

On the other hand, placing cubes may help beginner or less experienced player not to fizzle so better keep this for when you are confident

[dschingis27]

Is it to throw off the opponent to make it seem like they haven't gotten many animal cards?

While flexibility is the main reason, it is also a little bit of the above. You can pretend to have less points and also pretend you don't have a free spot to take a new card. Moreover, you give your opponent some small extra thinking task, they have to calculate and mentally juggle a little bit more than if you had just scored the card.

Funny enough though, almost everyone who uses delayed cube-scoring has fallen victim to it at least once or twice, even the highest ranked players. It can happen that you overlook that your opponent can finish the game and you don't get another turn. In that case, your opponent gets an easy win by finishing and make you look stupid, you have a lot of potential points had you just placed the cubes. It happened to me at least twice, classic blunder.

For a while I tried to avoid this blunder by at least scoring everything in the penultimate round. That is a good "intermediate" strategy to do the delayed cube-scoring for a while but not running the risk to blunder the game.

[pahakuukkeli]

Is it to keep flexibility in case they want to use a token a with a different animal card than it originally seemed? Is it to throw off the opponent to make it seem like they haven't gotten many animal cards? Is there some other reason?

In my opinion, flexibility is the only valid reason to do this. It can make quite a big difference in some games. Especially with long rivers, it's quite easy to mess up and potentially lose multiple animal cubes later in the game.

I play almost exclusively turn-based so throwing off the opponent doesn't seem reasonable. If they're good enough to keep the score, they're almost certainly good enough to add the "hidden" cubes to the score, too. This may be a bit more valid reason in live games, but without live scoring the argument from turn-based games should mostly hold (if the live score is ever implemented, this might become more reasonable thing to do in live games).

Other reasons? Well, it seems that some players think they look better if they're doing this, so maybe vanity? There's been multiple games where my opponent has preferred not to place the cubes over blocking a great animal from me.

I guess my advice would be: when in doubt, place the cubes. In other words, if you don't have a clear and solid reason to delay, there's NO reason to.

[Skrybowiedzma]

I mostly play fast real-time games, often on a phone, and I noticed placing cubes later in game can save some time. It is because you can't undo just the last move, you undo your whole turn. It's easy to accidentally place a cube where you don't want it (for example place a monkey cube where you want to build higher mountain and place the Capricorn spirit cube) and if it happens, you loose valuable seconds. If you wait for more cubes to be placed in one turn, you can simply start by clicking the animal that cannot be placed in any place you don't want it and make sure no missclick messes up your cubes.

It may be just a few of seconds that you save, but especially if you are the 2nd player, there will come a turn when you have to decide if you should end the game or not. On that turn, you should calculate your score after your best move that would end the game and your opponent score and a few seconds saved here and there could make a difference between getting this right or wrong. Some games are won by a difference of 1 or 2 points, so miscalculation there could cost you a win.

I bet for the slower games it isn't the case. But placing your cubes later could also save you from accidentally placing a cube where you shouldn't (because you planned this place for another animal) and not noticing it before ending your turn.

[tbhp]

Personally, it's always good news to me when I see that a player has placed an animal that they didn't need to. It makes things so much easier to analyze, because by doing so they are limiting their future options. You have less to think about in terms of what other animals may show up which would have been more dangerous if placed in those same spaces. The score is set, you can rely on that in your calculations and you know your opponent possibly robbed themselves of future possibilities that could have made their board better.