Board Game Arena

Anyone have any thoughts on what the strongest/weakest special actions are? From my experience, I'd rank them something like this (though it's entirely possible I've got suboptimal strategies for some, and if so I'd love to know about them):

Strong:
- Muster: Stack blue or yellow villagers (or if you're really lucky, crab farmer and do both!), upgrade craft, cook, your worker stack's gather, and probably muster, then by third round you're spamming muster+cook and on fourth round your fourth guy upgrades clean then cleans twice. This seems very very good. Feels like it should be somewhat card-dependent, but it's not that crazy to have a stack of 5-6 blue/yellow icons and a decent bottom harvest power. Gets even better with utensils and a bigger stack of blue/yellow icons, obviously.
- Tend Land: My current thought is to run this as mini-muster (gather on blue+brown(sometimes?)+yellow and clean, generating as much food as possible); this gives you enough bone to keep itself going and incidentally cleans up most/all of the midden. I suspect there's room for further optimization here; I've been using the fourth worker to dump resources into trade, but that feels inefficient, and maybe it's more points to play for sets of 4 workers and three rounds of furnish (you make enough hide) or something? Early game feels like it should be nice because you can tend land instead of a single gather action, but this is only good if you have a lot of food or if it's round 3 (you need bones to upgrade the gathers to make tend land good)
- Recruit: This feels like it should be really good; I suspect I'm playing it suboptimally. Feels like the goal is to get maybe one extra worker at start of second round if you had a good start, ideally all three at start of third round, and definitely all three at start of fourth round (remember that you can use all but one of your workers to get and cook food before you start recruiting). Unclear what to do with those extra workers, though - you have extra workers, but you don't have a super action like muster to use them on. Rounds 2 and 3 it feels less bad to have to take a gather action for some particular resource for an upgrade. I typically do a bit of everything - upgrade anything helpful, end up with furnish on level 4, trade maxed or nearly maxed, and midden mostly cleaned, which breaks 50 points easily, but isn't as good as I can get with Muster food spam. Again, this feels like it should be good, and is definitely hard to do poorly with even as a beginner, but I'm not sure it's as good as a food spam action. Or there's room for improvement here.

Okay/unsure:
- Spin Wool: The upgrade is nice so you don't have to worry about feeding people as much. And obviously the idea is to spin wool as much as reasonable, since it gets better the more you do it (but you need something to do with the wool, can't just cook it like you would with muster). Unclear what the best use of the wool is; my first thought was furnish (points for people that you don't have to feed!) but that seems like it maxes out too fast. Maybe trade is better (trade wool into animals that you cook into more bones for more spinning?). Unclear if there's time to do both. Unclear if you want to skip later roofs for more wool for more trade+furnish to try to make time to do both.
- Innovate: Feels like this should be good, but also feels like I'm playing it suboptimally. With a typical special action, the goal of round 2 is to upgrade as much useful stuff as possible, so my bone typically goes into upgrading gather actions. I suspect what you want when playing innovate is to get animals, upgrade innovate, then use innovate to upgrade cook, cook the animals, use that to innovate other stuff (maybe gather actions?) and somehow end up with enough food to not starve. Feels great when it works, especially since you now upgrade with bone/food rather than trying to gather small amounts of random other stuff. Unclear how card-dependent this is, though (I don't have a ton of experience with it, and can't really extrapolate from standard games). Also unclear how much better it is compared to standard play. Innovate on clean on round 3 to upgrade it and clean right before feeding also always feels good.
- Build: Seems slightly better than just doing trade/furnish normally? Effectively lets you use bone as wild resources for trade and furnish. Might be useful for level 4 furnish if short on hide. Should also be useful for trade, and slightly better than ignoring furnish and trading bone directly (more flexible, and net resource gain once upgraded)

Terrible (probably?):
- Explore: I don't know what the goal is here. Early roof/utensils could be good, but early villager sucks since the bottom harvests usually aren't great and you need to feed them, and having enough resources to upgrade and use explore much before round 3 feels hard. Maybe there's a play where you max furnish and go for sets of 4 workers, but I'm not sure how you feed all of them. I guess you could focus on roof/utensils from the standard villager row to somewhat help the food issues? Entirely possible I'm missing something
- Hunt boar: Effectively, it prints a ton of hide and knives. I'm not sure what to do with a ton of hide and knives; I don't think the sets of workers points are high enough to justify maxing furnish, level 4 furnish isn't that hard to do regardless, and hide isn't that great for trading. Maybe also spam low-power cleans so you don't have to feed people? I might need to try this once, but I suspect it's not great. Knives are good, I guess - they're flexible resources or just endgame points. But overall, I'm not liking any of this. If there is something clever here, I'm not seeing it. Honestly, hunt boar as an action doesn't seem much better than spamming yellow gather (as either pure grain or cows depending on if you want hide and bone), and spamming yellow gather feels like a weak action.
- Baseline - pretend you don't have a special action: This doesn't completely suck? Stacking a non-brown villager color and playing for level 4 furnish, reasonable cleaning, and as much trade as possible seems to break 50 points with decent play. (Trade bones once you're done with gather upgrades since there's nothing better to do with them.)

My thoughts after trying to minmax this game a bit (averaging 64-65 points since I came back to it), I your assessment is mostly correct.

For me recruit is the strongest and most consistent - the idea is to get 20 from trade, ~18 from upgrades, ~12 from special cards and then around 15 from food + villagers. You hire once at the start of round 2 and then 3x in rounds 3 and 4. The sheer number of actions, used efficiently, guarantees a high score.

Muster has the highest ceiling but is dependent on the deck, and whether your opponent cares about blocking you. However, even if you don't get a sick stack of food villagers, you can still build at least a +4 resource turn from it which is enough to hit 60. Villagers that give you a rune gather from another biome can be very nice here.

Tend Land is a solid 3rd, upgrade gather actions and go ham. Using the resources effectively needs some planning though.

Innovate for me is a clear 4th best, but again needs planning and a lot of food to fuel; Your only craft actions will be Craft itself and Innovate. I have just had a nice game with it scoring 68 for an example of how to use it: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=886731995

Now we have the 'bad 4' which I have less experience with:

Build - I am not sure if it's worth it. You can get a 6 resource discount maxing the Trade track, maybe some small help with Furnish if it's a game where you can use that. Most of the value seems to come from making the trade track easier, but with good planning it's usually possible to max it anyway so the advantage is slight.

Hunt Boar - It's a furnish play-around card with the extra hides, so don't play around it. Use as an outlet for bones in the lategame, the results are more consistent than Explore.

Explore - Another furnish play-around, I don't see how it works. Again, you can use the action to dump extra bones in the last round. This can sometimes hit a sick card, but usually worse than hunt boar.

Spin Wool - This is better than Hunt Boar/Explore for having as your main strategy, however I think the results are actually worse than playing with no special action for 3 rounds. The other two actions can generate some small value in round 4 where spin wool simply can't as you need to use it many many times. That's why I would rank it as the worst action to pick.


I think the above is how I would rank them in order of preference, but Build might actually be worse than Hunt Boar or even Explore, I would need to play with them more.