Appearances and Showing Your Hand

Some of you might have seen this tweet the other day, and thought about what it means:

Appearances: I’m not talking about what each player looks like – I’m talking about how much of your strategy you show. Now, to some, this might be an obvious little bit of strategy: “Don’t let my opponent know what I’m going to do next.” Others might have never have thought about it.

In my games played after the above tweet was posted, I really kept track of how people reacted to my moves. I noticed that it’s very tough to win when you have a good start to the game – people start to attack you (with good reason) and if somebody happens to when somebody inevitably does pass you, it is extremely difficult to bounce back. But is it ok to limit yourself at the beginning of the game just to stay under the radar?

Armies and Roads (Or Maybe Not)

I’ve mentioned the longest road and largest army before on here, and undoubtedly anyone visiting this blog knows what they are – 2 points for owning the longest trading route of roads (and/or ships if we’re playing the Seafarers expansion) as well as 2 points for having the largest army of knights (from Development Cards). A couple of questions jump to mind:

1. What is the main role of each of these outside of the 2 points they give?
2. How useful are these two extra ways of gathering points?

The main role of road building is to develop settlements. The rules of Settlers state that two roads need to separate every connected settlement. Roads are necessary for any development past the original two settlements of each player. We can then say that roads are really the most fundamental way of expanding spatially (no roads are necessary to upgrade a settlement to a city). This is an inherit part of our overall strategy, as it is next to impossible to win with only the original settlement spaces (I suppose that one could do it by upgrading both to cities, obtaining the largest army, and purchasing their remaining 4 points in development cards, but that’s quite the challenge).