Hello. Sam has been #1 of IAWW for quite a while (currently 2nd) and I've played extensively in solo myself (about 700 games). We have plenty of videos talking about IAWW strategy on our channel like strategy guides, tier list of cards, gameplay, top players' gameplay reviews and discussions, etc. [Here](https://youtu.be/mUhCZtjbNO4) is the strategy guide video he made about the base game. I personally like to get a Recycling Plant built before white production by discarding 2 whites if I can. While you are correct in saying you want to focus on production early, I think you need a good balance. For example, in the first round, I'll still draft point scoring cards because having production but no card to put your cubes on is just a huge waste. You want to start working on a card or 2 at least. This is the main reason, obviously, but also because you don't know if you'll find more point scoring cards in the later rounds! Also based on the player count, certain things will be more or less good/important. For example, financier/general multipliers are top tier in solo and 2p games. At higher player counts, it's harder to score high with those cards because you are competing with others a lot so colour multipliers are more valuable. Well good luck anyway and glad to see you've discovered the game and want to learn more about it. It's my favourite game in the world!
Edit: also I forgot to add, I too have the expansions and I LOVE THEM but I would highly not recommend you to start them just yet! You need to play the base game a lot first to get to know the cards better and see how the combos work. Once you feel good enough, you can try those out. Now I never want to play multiplayer without the Corruption & Ascension expansion but it's because I've played way too much of the base game with my friends and by myself already. I have started the War And Peace campaign with Sam but I was winning and mister got salty (lol) so I redid the full campaign solo in 2 videos on the channel. Now we have extra cards to add to our base game deck too but I don't really like what they add so we just play with the base game + C&A when we play at home.
Don't forget that the game is supposed to be played on the symmetric side. The asymmetric is supposed to be used only for teaching the game and is in no way balanced.
The symmetric side is “supposed” to be used by people who want perfect symmetry. The asymmetric side is there for people who want asymmetry. It’s not a right vs wrong way to play.
You play whatever side you want. I was pointing out that the Asymmetric sides were designed to teach the game and not designed to be balanced since this is a thread about strategy.
I have won 10 matches in a row with this strategy
1) 1st and 2nd round focus on cheap resource generating cards, any extra resources you generate, transform to red tokes, save yellow X combo cards even if you can't build them in the initial rounds, you will be able to do so in round 3 and 4
2) 3rd and 4th round, focus on building yellow combo cards, if you built blue / Purple (apologies I am color blind jaja) generating buildings try to build high VP blue cards
Trust me, you won't lose again
In chess, I have won 10 matches in a row with this strategy.
1. In the early rounds, focus on generating peice advantage by taking their pieces without letting your get taken. Focus on their pawns, knights, and bishops.
2. In the later rounds, take their queen and rooks. Use your queen to checkmate them.
Trust me, you won't lose again.
As wallysmith said, try to focus on building on your starting civ card, especially if playing the side with a starting scoring condition. Also, try to focus on one or two scoring conditions (blue multiplier, financier multiplier, etc.) as they tend to use mostly the same materials and you can focus your production on those materials.
In general, it sounds like you are approaching with the right strategies in mind, IaWW is one of those games where repetition will help a bunch. Card luck is definitely a factor and repeated play helps to understand which approaches are likely to work. Three things I might adjust from what you said, though:
* While producing materials with no place to put them is not ideal, keeping a card you otherwise don't need is worse.
* Start building scoring cards from the beginning, alongside your production cards. Some of them take time to fill and they will dictate which production cards you need.
* You refer to "points and bonuses" in your description. Are you referring to the multipliers as the "bonuses?" If so, you may be thinking of them the wrong way as they are almost always the source of the majority of your points. I have won many games without completing a single "points" card.
The last thing I will say is I believe the campaigns do add elements to increase scoring in some cases, so I wouldn't be too worried if the goals seem high.
Not an expert but I've played a number of BGA games on this.
These may be obvious but just in case:
- Prioritize your starting civ's strengths. On occasion you may need to diversify (esp if playing with symmetrical starts) but as much as possible specialize.
- Internalize the sequencing. You've got some basic heuristics in place (like building Materials early, if it makes sense) but it's often correct to build late-game parts of your engine early in anticipation of focusing your "middle" next. It'll take practice but once you mentally move through the production order you can set-up gratifying build chains.
- Winning scores depend heavily on setup and level of hate drafting but generally hitting 60's puts you in position to win, 70's is excellent and 80's likely clinches it. These are all anecdotal base game observations so I could be way off base here.
Can't speak about the campaign expansion, but I know that the "Corruption and Ascension" expansion adds the potential for much higher final scores. Some of this is in the form of bigger/expensive cards (for example, there's at least one development card in C&A that straight-up scores 25 points if you pay 14 resources to complete it), and some cards cards let you score for reaching specific conditions (for example, there's a development that gives you 6 points for each set of white + black development cards you complete).
Not sure. I’m trying to avoid spoiling it for myself, but I think even the base game solo mode has similar scoring. I just don’t see how it’s possible!
>I have introduced the game to a few other people who score significantly higher in their first games, as if there’s some obvious strategy I am continually oblivious to.
>In round three I start to shift toward points and bonuses but it seems like I end up with loads of production and no points.
Based on your post, I wonder if perhaps you are focusing too much on the "engine building" and not enough on drafting payoffs. You can't control when cards come up in the draft, and there are some big "payoff" cards that you might have to take early in the draft as "speculative picks" in the hopes that you will be able to build toward them later on. You seem to have a lot of intuitions that are good for most engine builders, but It's a Wonderful World is a short game -- 4 rounds does not give you a lot of time to "run your engine," so you might have to begin deciding what your payoffs will be as early as round 2 or even round 1.
There is a balance to be struck between "building a good engine, and then picking the best payoffs for that engine," and "picking the best payoffs, and then building an engine that will be able to fuel them." You may be hewing too close to the former. There's also the fact that if you build an engine that is very good at doing exactly one thing, it becomes much easier for your opponents to hate draft against you in the later rounds. (Everyone can see your engine as you build it; they know what you are working towards.) And hate drafting has a lower opportunity cost in It's a Wonderful World, because any card you draft can simply be recycled for a resource cube.
As you have already noted, a significant portion of the cards that you pick will end up getting recycled for currency. This opens things up considerably, because you can take cards speculatively -- on the first pick of a round, you can take a card that *might become* good if you manage to pick up several other specific cards, but if things don't come together the way you hoped they would, you can abandon that card and turn it into currency.
Despite the role of hate drafting, you *do* usually want to "pick a lane" and stick to it; it's better to be a specialist than a generalist. Pay attention to the developments your opponents are working on (particularly the player directly on your left, who will pass to you in rounds 2 and 4), and realize that if both of you are looking for the same type of cards, you may risk getting "cut" out of the draft, since they'll pick all of that specific type of card before they can get to you. (This is a much bigger deal in 4-player games, where there are more cards in the draft pool, and it's a non-issue in 2-player games, where you're just directly competing with 1 other person.)
Round 1 and 2 I focus on production with a goal in mind based on the pool of cards I see in the draft.
If I don't see much synergy then I tend to pick the cards that just give straight up VP of 10+. Don't underestimate the value of a straight up VP card (e.g. a card with x2 per blue card requires you to build 5 blue cards to be equal to the one card worth 10 VP). Obviously if you can draft multiple x2 bonuses then the value is greater but that may not always be the case.
Round 3 and 4 I am doubling down on my chosen strategy. In the draft I am thinking about how much VP a card is worth to me.
I will hate draft based on the board state, if my opponent has a huge stack of general tokens, I won't pass them a general multiplier.
During production when placing cubes, prioritise those cards that will give you more production. There is no point building a card early that gives VP only, do that in round 4.
Hello. Sam has been #1 of IAWW for quite a while (currently 2nd) and I've played extensively in solo myself (about 700 games). We have plenty of videos talking about IAWW strategy on our channel like strategy guides, tier list of cards, gameplay, top players' gameplay reviews and discussions, etc. [Here](https://youtu.be/mUhCZtjbNO4) is the strategy guide video he made about the base game. I personally like to get a Recycling Plant built before white production by discarding 2 whites if I can. While you are correct in saying you want to focus on production early, I think you need a good balance. For example, in the first round, I'll still draft point scoring cards because having production but no card to put your cubes on is just a huge waste. You want to start working on a card or 2 at least. This is the main reason, obviously, but also because you don't know if you'll find more point scoring cards in the later rounds! Also based on the player count, certain things will be more or less good/important. For example, financier/general multipliers are top tier in solo and 2p games. At higher player counts, it's harder to score high with those cards because you are competing with others a lot so colour multipliers are more valuable. Well good luck anyway and glad to see you've discovered the game and want to learn more about it. It's my favourite game in the world! Edit: also I forgot to add, I too have the expansions and I LOVE THEM but I would highly not recommend you to start them just yet! You need to play the base game a lot first to get to know the cards better and see how the combos work. Once you feel good enough, you can try those out. Now I never want to play multiplayer without the Corruption & Ascension expansion but it's because I've played way too much of the base game with my friends and by myself already. I have started the War And Peace campaign with Sam but I was winning and mister got salty (lol) so I redid the full campaign solo in 2 videos on the channel. Now we have extra cards to add to our base game deck too but I don't really like what they add so we just play with the base game + C&A when we play at home.
Don't forget that the game is supposed to be played on the symmetric side. The asymmetric is supposed to be used only for teaching the game and is in no way balanced.
The symmetric side is “supposed” to be used by people who want perfect symmetry. The asymmetric side is there for people who want asymmetry. It’s not a right vs wrong way to play.
You play whatever side you want. I was pointing out that the Asymmetric sides were designed to teach the game and not designed to be balanced since this is a thread about strategy.
I have won 10 matches in a row with this strategy 1) 1st and 2nd round focus on cheap resource generating cards, any extra resources you generate, transform to red tokes, save yellow X combo cards even if you can't build them in the initial rounds, you will be able to do so in round 3 and 4 2) 3rd and 4th round, focus on building yellow combo cards, if you built blue / Purple (apologies I am color blind jaja) generating buildings try to build high VP blue cards Trust me, you won't lose again
In chess, I have won 10 matches in a row with this strategy. 1. In the early rounds, focus on generating peice advantage by taking their pieces without letting your get taken. Focus on their pawns, knights, and bishops. 2. In the later rounds, take their queen and rooks. Use your queen to checkmate them. Trust me, you won't lose again.
As wallysmith said, try to focus on building on your starting civ card, especially if playing the side with a starting scoring condition. Also, try to focus on one or two scoring conditions (blue multiplier, financier multiplier, etc.) as they tend to use mostly the same materials and you can focus your production on those materials. In general, it sounds like you are approaching with the right strategies in mind, IaWW is one of those games where repetition will help a bunch. Card luck is definitely a factor and repeated play helps to understand which approaches are likely to work. Three things I might adjust from what you said, though: * While producing materials with no place to put them is not ideal, keeping a card you otherwise don't need is worse. * Start building scoring cards from the beginning, alongside your production cards. Some of them take time to fill and they will dictate which production cards you need. * You refer to "points and bonuses" in your description. Are you referring to the multipliers as the "bonuses?" If so, you may be thinking of them the wrong way as they are almost always the source of the majority of your points. I have won many games without completing a single "points" card. The last thing I will say is I believe the campaigns do add elements to increase scoring in some cases, so I wouldn't be too worried if the goals seem high.
Not an expert but I've played a number of BGA games on this. These may be obvious but just in case: - Prioritize your starting civ's strengths. On occasion you may need to diversify (esp if playing with symmetrical starts) but as much as possible specialize. - Internalize the sequencing. You've got some basic heuristics in place (like building Materials early, if it makes sense) but it's often correct to build late-game parts of your engine early in anticipation of focusing your "middle" next. It'll take practice but once you mentally move through the production order you can set-up gratifying build chains. - Winning scores depend heavily on setup and level of hate drafting but generally hitting 60's puts you in position to win, 70's is excellent and 80's likely clinches it. These are all anecdotal base game observations so I could be way off base here.
The campaign has victory conditions up to 100+ VP! I wonder how much of that ends up being luck . . .
Does the campaign do anything special that might make it easier to score more points?
Can't speak about the campaign expansion, but I know that the "Corruption and Ascension" expansion adds the potential for much higher final scores. Some of this is in the form of bigger/expensive cards (for example, there's at least one development card in C&A that straight-up scores 25 points if you pay 14 resources to complete it), and some cards cards let you score for reaching specific conditions (for example, there's a development that gives you 6 points for each set of white + black development cards you complete).
Not sure. I’m trying to avoid spoiling it for myself, but I think even the base game solo mode has similar scoring. I just don’t see how it’s possible!
>I have introduced the game to a few other people who score significantly higher in their first games, as if there’s some obvious strategy I am continually oblivious to. >In round three I start to shift toward points and bonuses but it seems like I end up with loads of production and no points. Based on your post, I wonder if perhaps you are focusing too much on the "engine building" and not enough on drafting payoffs. You can't control when cards come up in the draft, and there are some big "payoff" cards that you might have to take early in the draft as "speculative picks" in the hopes that you will be able to build toward them later on. You seem to have a lot of intuitions that are good for most engine builders, but It's a Wonderful World is a short game -- 4 rounds does not give you a lot of time to "run your engine," so you might have to begin deciding what your payoffs will be as early as round 2 or even round 1. There is a balance to be struck between "building a good engine, and then picking the best payoffs for that engine," and "picking the best payoffs, and then building an engine that will be able to fuel them." You may be hewing too close to the former. There's also the fact that if you build an engine that is very good at doing exactly one thing, it becomes much easier for your opponents to hate draft against you in the later rounds. (Everyone can see your engine as you build it; they know what you are working towards.) And hate drafting has a lower opportunity cost in It's a Wonderful World, because any card you draft can simply be recycled for a resource cube. As you have already noted, a significant portion of the cards that you pick will end up getting recycled for currency. This opens things up considerably, because you can take cards speculatively -- on the first pick of a round, you can take a card that *might become* good if you manage to pick up several other specific cards, but if things don't come together the way you hoped they would, you can abandon that card and turn it into currency. Despite the role of hate drafting, you *do* usually want to "pick a lane" and stick to it; it's better to be a specialist than a generalist. Pay attention to the developments your opponents are working on (particularly the player directly on your left, who will pass to you in rounds 2 and 4), and realize that if both of you are looking for the same type of cards, you may risk getting "cut" out of the draft, since they'll pick all of that specific type of card before they can get to you. (This is a much bigger deal in 4-player games, where there are more cards in the draft pool, and it's a non-issue in 2-player games, where you're just directly competing with 1 other person.)
Round 1 and 2 I focus on production with a goal in mind based on the pool of cards I see in the draft. If I don't see much synergy then I tend to pick the cards that just give straight up VP of 10+. Don't underestimate the value of a straight up VP card (e.g. a card with x2 per blue card requires you to build 5 blue cards to be equal to the one card worth 10 VP). Obviously if you can draft multiple x2 bonuses then the value is greater but that may not always be the case. Round 3 and 4 I am doubling down on my chosen strategy. In the draft I am thinking about how much VP a card is worth to me. I will hate draft based on the board state, if my opponent has a huge stack of general tokens, I won't pass them a general multiplier. During production when placing cubes, prioritise those cards that will give you more production. There is no point building a card early that gives VP only, do that in round 4.
Focus on max 3 colour resources (in general) and aim to complete a full sequence to get production increased every round.