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[Doom_Shark]

So I recently played the following kingdom:



Colony/Platinum and Shelters were included. For the first game (My family plays every kingdom twice) we mostly went for Forager and Prosperity stuff. I crushed them, and since I felt bad, the second time I tried something that was talked about when we started but nobody tried: using the Rats self-gaining ability to enable a Vineyard strategy. I waited to buy Potions until others started greening, so as to focus on getting my actions until then. I surprisingly hit fairly often, and as such got Rogues, to dig more actions out of the trash (e.g. Hermit), and Vaults, to make use of the many, many Rats as Coppers. Somehow managed to buy a Grand_Market. Even got a couple Platinums and a Province! Ended up one action short for each Vineyard to be worth 7 (20 actions in deck). Ended up skipping over Gold entirely. Ended up with 7 Vineyards, one Province, and I think one Estate, for a grand total of 49. I lost, of course, but the question is, is this a viable strategy elsewhere?

[jomini]

A single Rats without, a way to gain cards, is 10 bonus actions. This is good for 3.33 VP per vineyard or 26.7 VP if you sweep the Vineyards. This gets higher if you can line up Pots & Rats after you have bought out the Vineyards.


So say your game will last 18 turns (enough time for an engine player to pile the provinces, maybe even a fast/green tolerant BM to pile the provinces). This gives you 10 buys that will not be Vineyards. Say you do eventually Rats all the pots, okay now you have just about 7VP per Vineyard. 56 VP is a lot, but a Province player needs just 3 duchies to beat that. Quite doable, particularly for engine players as you cannot force a three pile.

Worse this is just about your best case scenario. Late in the game you will have zero buying power and have to wait through 5 or 6 hands before you can begin to turn gains into new Rats. More realistically, it will be pretty hard to Rats the pots as you really cannot afford to miss a Vineyard so then you are looking at odds of hitting just Pots and greens.

Still Rats is a good tactical play with Vineyard. On this board, you really want to go Hermit/Rogue/Gm. Not only can you replace all the starting cards with Rats, but you can also stock up on Hermits & Foragers from the Hermit gains, and use Rogue to stock up on Hermits. Buying extra coppers to Rats later is also possible. It will be very hard to get the Vineyards up to competing with Colonies (particularly with $6 Foragers), but on a Province board, I suspect the Vineyards will be dominant.

[liopoil]

With rats you'll want to skip out on the platina. Vault, GM, and even Forge are all very nice.