Tips and tricks for good runs?

[orbitalkartoffel]

Can anyone help me? What are good strategies for this game, how do I get good synergies und what should I consider in the beginning? Tell me everything you know, because I can't get past the 5-6th payment.

Looking forward for any help! :)

[Silyon]

Learning how various symbols interact is incredibly important. As in, nearly the entire game by itself. What "eats" what, what boosts what, and what items complement symbols you have. For instance, Seeds. Seeds grow into flowers or random fruit, some of which are high-value. Seeds grow more quickly with Rain or Farmers next to them, and the farmers also boost the fruit they produce. Low-value fruit in turn gets eaten by Ms. Fruit, increasing her value potentially infinitely, but she doesn't eat high-value fruit like Apples or Watermelon. So the rare Fertilizer Item is actually bad if you have Ms. Fruit, because it becomes much harder to feed her. There's hundreds of potential interactions like that, and learning about them all is basically the entire game.

Of course, if you can't get past the early-game hurdle you're not going to see most of the rarer symbols in the first place. Good early-game strategies play off of Infants, Dwarves, and lockboxes/keys, but a lot of the tone for a given run tends to be set by what the game decides to give you for your first few items, rather than symbols themselves. Flexibility is key, you can't successfully "force" a given synergy.

[pilvlp]

Coal -> Diamonds and miners have been successful for me.

[R3sistance]

This game is luck based, nobody will ever get 100% success rate, the best chance you can have is to get a good understanding of each symbol and how they fund you over the short and long term. If you get too many short term investments you'll suffer in the long term but if you invest too much in the long term you'll burn out fast.

Coal is good for a few mid-game diamonds early on but gives nothing until they become diamonds, so taking 2 coal before the first payment is usually a fatal mistake, magpies taken on the 2-4th rolls also are an issue since they probably won't pay out until after the first payment.

The main goal however is to boost the average value of your board, think of most symbols as a numerical value goldfish, cats, coins, cherries are all 1 coin value pieces whereas, owls for example should be seen as a 1.33 average gold piece and a sloth as a 1.5 average gold piece but wolves are a 2 average gold piece. If your board is pulling in an average of 30 gold a spin from 20 symbols, then your board is around an average of 1.5, so a sloth is merely on par where a wolf boosts the value of your board and the other mentioned symbols all lower it.

The next thing to consider are things (symbols and items) that multiply or modify the worth of a piece, for example, if you have Pizza the Cat, those same cats from before are now a 2 average gold piece. Cats also can drink milk, so if you have a cow then cats have a slightly higher value. However if instead of Pizza the cat, you have Black Cat, the cat will again become worth an average of 2 gold pieces but the gold they generate from milk is also doubled as black cat doubles the gold income of cats. In either case if your board average was 1,5 in both these cases cats improve it however black cat improves it slightly better.

The best pieces however are pieces that gain value over time, first there are the consumers, these are Diver, Ms. Fruit, Eldritch Horror, Geologist and Pirate. These pieces gain value by destroying other symbols, this means throughout the game their value will increase, there is a slight conflict between Geologist and Diver to consider, as Divers will destroy oysters but oyster can provide essentially infinite growth to Geologist via pearls.

Additionally there are other symbols that become more valuable with the board, the wildcard symbols, a wildcard is always a wildcard, a Card Dealer makes adjacent card symbols wildcards and the copy cat item makes cats wild cards. A wildcard takes the value of the highest adjacent (non-wildcard) symbol before it applies it's own multipliers. Finally there is the multiplier symbols, some are better than others and it partially is based on what you have, arrows are generally consistent (at pointing off of the board) where most multipliers are based on being adjacent to partial symbols, notably the sun and moon symbols are heavily affected by the clear skies item which makes them adjacent across the board (1 flower + 19 suns pulls stupid numbers ~1.9 trillion a spin)

I'd advise being careful with pieces that remove value for later benefit, such as magpie, thief or robin hood. Magpie can be good but can also game over if taken at the wrong point, it takes -1 gold each turn and every 4th turn adds 9 (the -1 still applies for a total of 8). Thief needs special pieces to kill it and will remove -1 gold every turn until then, if you don't already have the right symbol, they can end out hanging out for a long time and it might in the long run reach a point where it becomes not worthwhile to seek such a piece and to remove them, they are the riskiest piece which removes gold and finally robin hood is basically like magpie but the numbers are larger, it also adds gold to certain symbols and may destroy certain symbols for a quick gold payout, more of a risk than magpie but the payout makes it more worthwhile.

Lastly, as with robin hood in the above example, some pieces destroy other pieces, the consumers mentioned all destroy symbols but other pieces also destroy symbols for a quick payout, like miner or dwarf. Early on these symbols can give a needed boost, the effect supplied for destroying a symbol will be in the description and the symbol being destroyed may include a description of what it supplies by being destroyed. Early on quite power, more so if you say have 3 candies which are worth 1 gold each, you could get removal capsules to remove them or you could get 1 toddler who will eventually eat them all and then remove just 1 toddler, a flower and a cherry. Removing pieces is a way to increase board value and having lesser symbols is more consistent than having more symbols, try to avoid having too many symbols as it rarely leads too a good run. Some Symbols create other symbols such as oyster or Midas, these pieces should be avoided unless there is a good synergy for it, such as Geologist (for oyster) or Pirate (for Midas), additionally the symbols generated are pearls and coins, which both are a default 1 gold worth.

[dholland]

I suggest getting eaters before the items they eat when offered. If not, stop at 1 consumable of that type in case you never get the eater. Try to add 2 and 3 value permanent symbols as well as temporary items, but be choosy based on the average you need to make rent. Don't go over 25 symbols if you don't have removal tokens.

You can only have 20 symbols on the board anyway. If you're lucky enough to have a producer-permanent eater combo, make sure you have between 2 and 5 empties consistently so that there are empty spaces for the consumable to spawn, hopefully next to the permanent eater. This also makes it more likely that your valuable permanent eater will appear on the board along with their food and arrows, which you want to happen as consistently as possible.

However, if you are well ahead of rent you can add some temporary items beyond this limit to stack up the permanent fast, just try to get rid of the excess before 1 rent cycle. Having more than one permanent eater of the same kind is very valuable because they will find the food faster and 2 could eat from the same symbol. So don't stop at 1 geologist and 1 silver arrow if you get offered more. Having more arrows and more high-value symbols to be hit makes the arrows much more consistently valuable. Geos are usually better than Mrs. Fruit, unless you have watering can and compost heap. Don't get compost heap before you have Mrs. Fruit.

Once you have a powerful synergy which could win the game, don't dilute it by adding different weaker synergies (unless you've already won and want to transition to a better build if you get the right items). It's usually smart to use your removal tokens at that point to make the strong synergy consistently stay on the board, even if that makes up to 5 empties.

With the new update, pirates with King Midas (after you get a pirate) is strong. Having luck multipliers like lucky cat, lucky carrot, rabbit fluff, is a lot of help here. If you have enough luck to get golden arrows and Eldritch, these are very strong once you have 3 or more, just like geos, but they are much easier to stack up value as they all get the same value after one eats.

Thieves are much more valuable than they used to be, but if you have too much luck it may need Midas bomb to get rid of them! Which is very risky but can pay off well if you don't just destroy your build.

Be patient, you won't get what you need to make a winning build every game. I still recommend permanent eater arrow strategies, and coal->diamond with dames also gives good arrow targets. Beastmaster can be decent with wolves and quigley, and helps make your cats worth more if you have lucky cat. Both dames and beastmasters become very strong if you have many of them with many high-value recipients to buff. Also, if you get protractor (maybe with swapping device) or telescope, they are incredibly strong. Telescope is basically an automatic win since most symbols work on adjacency.

[orbitalkartoffel]

After reading all your help I tried another few rounds. What I changed in my style of playing this, is to use the black Stones, which let me destroy an icon, I just really never used that! And it kinda instantly worked, which led me to payment 7-8! Big improvement!

I had a really nice run with the millionaire, cheese and wine, simultaneously, I had some dwarfs, some beer and the item which doubles the income from beer and wine!