Stay on Target

This first one might seem a bit obvious, but grasping it is fundamental to being successful at winning games because everything flows from it. There are going to be a minimum of 13VPs available to you when the game starts, comprised of a primary condition (5), a secondary (3), a faction (2), and knight killer (3). There’s almost certainly going to be more as your opponent is unlikely to take the field with just a knight and a cypher, and you may even have flipped the Wild and/or Void condition.

You do not need to score all these VPs to win the game. A standard 50pt game needs only 8VPs, and a standard tournament format game needs just 6VPs. Do not try and complete all of these victory conditions. Figure out the quickest way to the 6 or 8VP threshold and focus on those only. Every action you spend completing a victory condition which is not one of the ones you need is an action wasted. It might be tempting to hedge your bets and assign different units to each of the conditions, but this will rarely be an efficient use of your activations.

It certainly could be the case that during play, a victory condition you wanted to complete becomes unavailable, or another victory condition emerges as being easier to achieve, so you might have to be flexible, but at any given time you should only be focusing on the conditions you need to win the game.

Figuring out which are the victory conditions you need mainly comes with experience, but these strategy posts will hopefully assist in figuring out what your cadre is good at doing, and how it matches up to the victory conditions you’ve flipped and to the opposing cadre.

One thing to note is that whilst you can’t predict what the other available VPs will be, you do always know your faction condition. This means you should know in advance whether your cadre can effectively score it, and can include that in your calculations. If you can build a cadre to exploit it then you should as you don’t want to cut yourself off from any VPs if you don’t have to, but for some factions this isn’t always going to be possible. The Shattered Sword faction condition in particular is difficult to prepare for as it requires your opponent do something first.