I played a pretty fun rats board last night with my Wife.
Herbalist,Some 3 I can't remember,Marauder,Rats,Feast,Upgrade,Council Room, Embassy, Hunting Grounds, Kings Court.
I tend to avoid BM while my wife goes for it. She opened Marauder/Silver and I went Rats/Marauder. Then I started getting upgrades as I could with my spoils and silvers on 4 or <. It was nice to have a 4>5>6>7 path for upgrade, but I didn't end up getting a Hunting grounds I don't think but would like to retry it with them vs some golds. My wife got at least 2 provinces before my deck was formed well. Then I started KC'ing upgrades to trash rats. I ended up having a strong turn where I trashed 4 rats for Duchy's and got 1 province from a KC upgrade and then bought the Penultimate province in the buy phase. My deck was like 9 upgrades, 1 marauder, 4 KC's, 2 Council Rooms, 3 golds, lots o Rats. Trashing rats to upgrades gave lots of card draw to get a slew of them quickly.
Rats helped get rid of the Ruins easily since the deck was pretty tight. It is a bit harder to tell how well it really worked since I don't know how many turns this game went due to playing IRL, but my wife's BM game seemed pretty normal. She passed on one early province cause she hit 11 on like turn 6 and got gold/silver instead before she started buying provinces.