i know some people are raring for strategy article about this game,i'm pretty new to the game myself but i think i got a decent grasp of it so if it's not a problem i'm going to get a head start and post some tips... so... how do you win at innovation? you basicaly have to follow at least 2 of these 3 roles as best as you can depending on what you draw,the 3 roles are the brainac,the emperor and the overachiever
- the brainac doesn't care about score or board,all he wants to do is getting to 8-10 as quick as possible,8-10 has all the cool toys,card's that let you score big,card that put your opponent in a nasty situation and best of all,card that instantly win you the game under the right situation,card that helps the brainac are writing,mathematics,paper,printing press... writing -> math -> paper is a good brainac opening for example
the good way to deal with the brainac is to pronge attack him,combine card that steals card from the board (compass,societies,enterprise) with card that steals from hand (archery,machinery,construction) and he'll be forced to share the tech one way or the other... another good way is to share your sucky effect in hope to ruin your opponent board,if your opponent use math to draw a 4 card and then you cover it by sharing sailing then his effort have been in vain,of course this requires a nice amount of luck to pull off... alternatively try to make each age run out as quick as possible,each age (beside 1 who has 14 and 10 who has 10) has only 9 card in it,with the brainac having removed at least 1,that means as long as you can draw or play more than 4 cards a turn (the wheel,fermentation,industrialization) you can catch up by simply removing all the obstacle between you and the high level tech,this is also a good way to play,role number 2 which is...
- the emperor! the emperor cares about board relevance,he wants to make big piles and then splay them forcing his opponent to share all of his effect and preventing any attack,the emperor loves card that gives him free draw and/or melding action like sailing,mysticism,reformation and most importantly industrialization which can give you a HUGE board presence,and of course he need his fair share of card to splay piles too with card like paper,metric system,flight,and mostly importantly measurements! the emperor has an hard time achieving era's quickly but he makes up by usualy ending up winning the domain achievement as long as nobody picked them up through other cards,one thing of importance when playing the emperor... you don't want to meld too many card with castle on them,except in rare case's castle become useless mid in the game as such other than splaying 3 castle for the empire domain achievement there is no reason to play castle card for their icons,try to focus on early card with other icons like agriculture,pottery,translation... you get the idea
the best way to beat the emperor is to end the game as soon as possible,if you score 4 era 2 domain achievements through cards then the emperor won't have any time to build,you do so by playing the role of....
- the overachiever! the overachiever only cares about scoring each era as quickly as possible,he scores,achieve's and tries to bring the game home ASAP,card that the overachiever like are clothing,metalworking,currency,agriculture (if playing brainac) and steam engine
with the overachiever there are 2 way to deal with him,the first is pretty obvious and it's to attack his score pile,these card include stuff like anatomy,vaccination,mapmaking,navigation and the biggest of them all,rocketry
the other way is to achieve thing yourself even if you are behind achievements and the overachiever has 1,2,3,4,5 if you end up scoring 6 then he will be forced to score 7 and if you score 7 he will be forced to score 8 instead and so on...
Alternate Way to win the game
most people seems to know about collecting 6 achievements but seems to have no idea about the other ways to win the game,the first one is by scoring,the game ends by scoring when a card higher than 10 gets drawn,one of the advantage of playing the brainac is that if you get to the 10 pile first and then deplete it,then you get to decide when the game ends,coincidentaly most of the 10 card let you score big so it's not uncommon for a brainac to get from a score of 0 to a score of 50 and then ending up winning on points
the other way are through special effect of high level cards these are...
- Empiricism ( 8 ),which wins you the game if you have 20 lightbulbs,handling the victory to an emperor who got most of the blue/purple cards as those are the ones that mostly often comes with a lightbulb
- Collaboration (9),which wins you the game if you have a stack of 10 green cards,handling the victory to an emperor who got most of the green cards
- Bioengineering (10),which wins you the game if your opponent doesn't have enough leaf making it good against people who haven't build their board like an overachiever
- Self Service (10) let you win if you have more achievements than your opponent
- Globalization (10) gives the victory to the player with the most point if there are more industry than leaves on the board thus making it a good brainac/overachiever carrd
- A.I (10) gives the victory to the player with the lowest score when 2 other 10 cards (Robotics and Software) are on ANY board as top cards... rather than fitting a strategy this is mostly a last resort card,note that if the difference between you and your opponent score is 9 or less,you will still lose the game as you gain more point before the other effect resolve but if you have less lightbulb than your opponent then you both get the effect and the score will get even,also if you try to pull the card off with software and you have to share the effect,do it only if the 10 stack is still full,using software means pulling 3 10 cards from the deck,so if both you and the opponent do so,you get to pull a great total of 6 cards thus forcing a draw of a card higher than 10 if only five 10 cards are present in the deck making the game ends by score
