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[sitnaltax]

This is a game I played the other night with 4 players. How would you tackle this board? Colonies and Platinums are active.

$2: Fool's Gold
$3: Oasis, Wishing Well
$4: Spice Merchant, Remodel
$5: Festival, Library, Venture
$7: Expand
$8: Peddler

At a quick glance, there are two big opportunities here, which everyone spotted: Fool's Gold and Peddler. Peddler looks particularly enticing because of the chance for Expand into a Colony, and because it will suffer less than FG if several opponents choose the same path. I drew 3/4 in the fourth seat. P1 and P3 both got 5/2 splits and opened Venture/Fool's Gold; almost certainly a mistake over Festival/FG, I think. I opened Silver/Spice Merchant and almost immediately kicked myself as P2 opened Oasis/Spice Merchant.

Although the Silver buy seemed like a horrible idea at the time, I'm not sure it was; P2 did get more Peddlers, but had to buy more Oases than Festivals early on, and wasn't able to hit Festival/Library often enough. With Spice Merchant eliminating his coppers, he eventually found himself dead-playing Library without any good cards to draw with it!

In the midgame P1 and P3 pursued the remaining FG while P2 and I went for the Peddlers. I belatedly got some Oases to drop Peddler prices as did P1, and all four of us picked up a few Festivals and Libraries to try to make that combo hit. P2 won the Peddler split 5/4 (P3 picking up an errant one). I went for an Expand and immediately began turning my Peddlers to Colonies. P2 had some $10-$12 turns and used them to buy Festivals and Libraries, which just seemed to not quite work out. P1 and P3 floundered a little, eventually getting up to Platinum but thinning with Spice Merchant too late to get the FG megaturns they needed.

With FG and Peddler exhausted, I looked for the last pile to deplete, and started buying Oasis with my scrap money after using Expand. Helped slightly by the somewhat-inexperienced P3, I was able to exhaust that pile before P2 could Expand more than one of his Peddlers into a Colony. He still got second, with the FG players not too far behind; they had been picking up provinces and the odd colony since the end started looming.

I'm not sure there is a moral to the story and it would have gone very different in two-player, but this was a pretty memorable game.

[qmech]

I've had problems in 2P games where I've gone Peddler/Expand -> Colony then stalled after pillaging my economy.  In a shorter 4P game that should be less of a problem, so on 4/3 I'd have gone Spice Merchant/Oasis looking for Peddlers as fast as possible.  On 5/2 though I'd find it hard to pass up Festival/FG.  This is an interesting set that might have best strategies that strongly depend on your opening split.