Board Game Arena

So it's summer, I upgrade the AleHouse so now it provides 2 meeples.

Next turn, my opponent, activates the alehouse and gets 2 meeples and effectively gives me 1 meeple for next turn winter where you can't use meeples for much anyway.

If I activate it, then essentially I turn 2 meeples into 2 random coloured meeples, no much benifit but could be useful.

Please tell me the benefit of this upgraded card?

It seems your big mistake is assuming meeples don't have much value in winter. Bids for final tiles (for the right tiles these should get quite high in winter), producing and moving resources based on tiles you've earned in fall (or expect to earn in winter) are all important. And then if there are winter VP tiles for meeples the extra meeples can be even more important. Spending 2 meeples in fall to get 2 meeples is great. You break even for fall and in winter you gain 2 extra meeples. Also it is something you can save for later into the fall because it won't help your opponent (they gain 0 meeples in fall and would give you 2 extra for winter).

If you have nothing better to do then maybe it's useful, but normally I would think you have got much better things to do.

Aswell, this does not take into account the effort required to upgrade the tile.

In the relevance of usefulness compared to other tiles, how do you rate the alehouse out of 10?

I would rank it as one of the stronger pieces, though to get the most use out of it and fully use it during the summer. Often a good strategy is to take it with 1 meeple (in a color you have a lot of) before upgrading, then after upgrading take it again with 2 meeples. This way you've spent 3 meeples and gotten 3 back so you haven't lost anything for summer and now have 3 extra meeples for both fall and winter. And if you have enough meeples to activate 3 times you can get 6 extra for fall and winter while only ending up down 1 meeple in summer.

This strategy obviously works best if you have a way to cash meeples in for victory points in the last round, if you do, this tile is a very powerful early tile to get out and get upgraded. If not, it is only mediocre since it doesn't directly give VP's for upgrading.