Board Game Arena

alexwjb wrote: ↑16 June 2026, 17:28

grnt wrote: ↑16 June 2026, 16:55 Would you yourself have known to play that way prior to this topic? I would say it's easy and straightforward to play once you know, but if you don't you might instead play it more like a lover for full actions/4th person, basically using it "fairly", in those cases I think it's powerlevel is more than fine to be unbanned. If someone hasnt played with the card before or know for a fact how it works I would go as far as to say it's close to impossible to use to its full strength, as the risk reward proposition doing so is "gain an amount of tempo" vs "lose the game on the spot"

I think because of this knowledge requisite the card is expected to perform significantly under its actual powerlevel until it is considered common knowledge across the sampled player base

I don't agree with this idea that there is a secret-sauce way to play Guest Room and that once you understand it, it becomes both very easy to play and overpowered. It strikes me as simply a convenient (in the sense of unfalsifiable) argument to explain away the fact that its statistics were strong, but not unduly strong.

It's not a complicated card to understand. Get a bunch of food and gather the resources, and you can start getting an extra action per round.

There are other cards that let you grow in Stage 1 - Bed Maker comes to mind. I'm not suggesting that Bed Maker is anywhere close to as strong as Guest Room. But it's interesting to me that Bed Maker is the single most overrated card in the game, in terms of the difference between its actual power and how early people draft it. I think that people see a card that can let you get more actions early and think it's stronger than it really is (see also: Little Stick Knitter). Bed Maker is a mediocre card with decent combo potential, but it's drafted as though it's a strong card. Guest Room, in my opinion, is a very strong card that is being treated as though it's completely broken. I think people continue to ignore the downsides of the card, in terms of it not giving you a real person worth points, not giving you a room worth points, its challenging food tempo, and the likelihood that you are allowing other players to grow earlier too.

I wrote up half a dozen (very reasonable ones, like taking 2 wood 2nd action r2/r3) scenarios for the card in stage 1 but got the "are you still there" popup which nuked my essay.
When I've been saying 6+ food that is the absolute lower bound I would expect to be able to put on it while being contested bottom feeding.

P1 uncontested bottom feeding with slight luck ended up with 9 food on the room, 2 wood, 2 stone and 1 reed at the end of stage 1 (maybe it was 1 wood I cant remember clearly.).

Fish woman can put 9 food on it round 3 (or fully stack it in round 4) with resources to spare and chairman+bottom feeding can put 10-11 round 4, the fish woman line in particular is super disgusting because it just plays a normal (slightly fortunate) fish woman game, taking wood first action round 2.

And the reason I think it makes a huge difference for this card is because you get to borrow food from your initial seed to dump, then fill back up with the bonus action in round 4 (2-4 food depending on day laborer/stack)

The reason why I think the actions are so incredibly powerful in stage 2 is in large part because of how easy it is to meet your food requirements at that point, you only need to find 4 food in 9 actions (and usually have some materials to spare), unlike the currently avaliable cheats it is doable to just use rsf and a stone major while prioritizing development and gathering materials (obviously you can pull off a heist on the sheep if someone isn't vigilant, or empty the stacking tiles if it improves your gamestate, but you get to do those things opportunistically rather than fighting to survive).