Kampfschwein Fjonda wrote: ↑03 October 2021, 12:10
I'm happy about such an insightful post of a strong player.
But also sad, because that proves to me a design flaw of the game :\
That's not a design flaw in my opinion. I think it is very good and vital that certain tiles are stronger/weaker at different stages of the game. If all tiles would be always equally strong it wouldn't matter what your decisions are.
The game would play you/us and we would pretty much never have to take 2 workers.
Oh and it is not entirely necessary to get any mine.
It is good to have at least one early mine but you can definitely win with 0 mines as well. It's just usually harder to do.
There are 2 knowledge tiles which are in my humble opinion way better than a phase A mine when it comes to efficiency of the tile alone.
These are tiles 13 and 3. 13 let's you get a silver additionally to 2 workers when you take the 2 workers action. It's my favorite tile in the game.
Tile 3 let's you sell goods for an extra silver. So you will receive 2 silver instead of 1 whenever you sell goods. Both tiles give way more silver during the game and way earlier when placed during phase A in comparison to a phase A mine.
So once you have any of these 2 tiles early on and bad dice rolls for mines you can skip the mines even though that still hurts.
The best board to skip mines is board 1 where all 3 mines are in a single 3-sized region. The 3-sized mine regions score the lowest amount of points and are also hard to place cheaply.