Counter strategy to 'plant your full tableau first'

[kevinsbane]

Was getting 23 sprouts, 2 growths, 2 seeds, 2 cards and 1 soil for every water action i took heh. So i spammed it 5 times.

[FrankJones]

Table where things got ridiculous - not that this should be the guiding principle. Nb Seeds gained in total: 61
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=762098626

This is one of the examples of the end-game stats double counting some actions (unconfirmed actions get double accounted).

Actual number of seeds was 35, which is still amazing.

[kevinsbane]

So I've been thinking about this a while, and have a few more comments. This mostly concerns abundance expansion by the way. In the standard game, the starting player with a decent hand has a huge advantage. Abundance has a lot of tools to catch up.

This style of play of pushing towards the end is called a tempo strategy. Strictly speaking, the goal is not necessarily to finish your board first in order to claim the 11/7 points. The reason why players will go for tempo is actually to be able to control when the game ends. Often, this results in someone pushing hard for an end game quickly, as this limits the ability for their opponent to be able to play out their strategy.

How do you counter tempo? Well, that's a bit tough actually. It is a strong strategy simply because plant is, by far, the strongest of the four standard actions available. You need a few ingredients.

1. You need a strong non-plant engine. In this case, blue flora are usually the best as they offer the most flexibility as well as many having powerful scoring opportunities. You'll notice that in all of the examples I have where I beat a tempo player involved a strong blue flora engine. If you can set up such an engine, you are forcing a tempo player to finish the game faster. This is not actually optimal for the tempo player. They may wish to set up a strong finish with good terrains, but doing so might mean you can run your flora engine an extra turn or two, generating many points and resources the tempo player can't get.

2. Going second. Losing tempo isn't all that bad when you go second; you're already naturally at a tempo disadvantage, but you have a big help in that you can do an uncontested double plant at the end of the game, erasing 2 full turns of tempo disadvantage, at the cost of 18 (or fewer) points. You'll notice that in all the examples I gave, I was going second.

3. Strong scoring terrains (or good scoring cards in general). The biggest weakness tempo has is that they can't slow down - they have to play the cards that they get, with the soil that they have without stopping to get resources else they lose tempo. That usually means those expensive 9+ soil scoring terrains aren't going to be a part of their final tableau. If you have decided not to compete on tempo, then you don't have to worry about finishing your tableau, and can use your actions to generate the resources (digging for cards, and soil to play those cards) to play quality scoring cards. A quality vs quantity situation.

4. Pivoting early. Once you've recognized that you aren't winning a tempo game, you have an extra seed that you can make from a leaf. Many times, leafs are actually better as seeds even if you can complete fauna goals. It's just tough to know when is the best time to convert leafs. However, the earlier you do it the more valuable that seed is. It's pretty easy to recognize that you've lost the tempo game, so trade that leaf and use that seed.

[FrankJones]

Well said on all points.

I usually go for the Tempo play, focusing heavily on the 7 goals, especially the 4 Fauna goals.
But, it's brutal when going first.

As you noted, that extra plant action can be punishing.

(For the rest for the forum, kevinsbane and I recently had a game that illustrated this very well. I was "ahead" by 60, and triggered end-game as player 1. I wasn't really ahead by 60, and I don't think I was every truly "ahead" at all, but the final plant action, after I had finished my tableau, scored one point for me... and 90 points for kevinsbane. NINETY. )

If you're player 1, you ideally want the game to end by having 15 cards and your opponent takes a plant action. Othwerwise you are helplessly looking at the board hoping your opponent's plant action won't be too damaging. And when playing high caliber players, it WILL be punishing.

[Curse Words]

From my experience the base game is about "plant your tableau first". This is because you cannot really stop or punish others if they are able to get down discount and soil generating terrains (or just cheap cards in general) and that really just cuts down the turns of what you can do. Then the game really becomes a battle of "who can draw the better/cheaper cards".

But the Abundance expansion changed this. There are now cards that depend on the cards on the opponent's tableaus. This means that you can essentially punish the other player by choosing non-plant actions. I think at higher level games, the cards that does this are
1. Madagascar Dragon Tree - the plant that gains one sprout for every two-ability card that the opponent has played; this means that if they opponent goes for a heavy green/terrain strategy, you will be able to punish them by choosing water. I really like this card since this card has won the game for me literally every time, once even gaining 10 sprouts from it when one of the end game goals is 2 ability card. Keep in mind this adds on to the 6 extra sprouts you already gain over your opponent when you are the one choosing blue action.
2. Snake plant - the plant the gains one sprout for every rainbow ability card the opponent has played, AND can be triggered by all 3 actions! The key is that this card is very cheap (only 2 soil) and can be triggered on every non-green action. A lot of times my opponent gets this down early-game before I plant my rainbow abilities so I just compost all of them instead of planting them. Quite a few games could be won by them if they waited for me to plant those cards before planting snake plant.
3. the starting hand card that gains one compost on red actions for every grey ability the opponent has (I forgot what this is called) - This is really punishing for any players who has a lot of terrain because you could easily get over 5 compost per red action (often more) and gain the soil you need for planting expensive cards, and this is just a nice punishing card for the opponent when they need soil from red actions.

[FrankJones]

I do like the sound of that Flora (Though I'm not sure I've ever had the opportunity to plant it). +1 sprout per opponent's card with 2 abilities is one of the best Flora abilities in the game. And it's a rainbow? [Edit: Whoops, it's blue.]

The climate card (Cold Winter Continental) that gives composts per tan is a bit trickier - I am not sure I've picked it. I don't use the compost action much, and I don't know whether my opponent will be planting Terrains. Against high Elo players, I'd much more comfortable picking it. Generally I prefer usable resources from my Climate card. Or I just pick one that helps with the goals.

Another important note regarding engine versus tempo-plant-rush is that it does require having some strong flora abilities, which means doing some planting. But, planting 4 times in the first 6 turns means the other player can trigger end-game in 6 turns by planting 6 times.

And, any plant-rush can end in 7 turns because I assume every player is planting at least twice in 7 turns. Occasionally I've had to plant 8 times, but that was because my opponent was doing seemingly random things, not setting up a monster scoring engine to counter my plant-rush.

So, the plant rush can be countered, but it's not easy. Kevinsbane is certainly good at it. Of course, a plant rush involving Green terrains is difficult to stop, since consistent activation of a large number of greens is going to likely top a countermeasure of 2-3 activations of water or the other two actions.

Snake plant is a decent card, though I usually play it for Fauna and Eco goals rather than the ability. My opponents rarely have rainbows. I typically get 0 or 1 sprouts, occasionally 2.