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[AJD]

So I just played a three-player (IRL) Colony game with the following cards:

Village
Workshop
Advisor
Farming Village
Herald
Quarry
Smithy
City
Contraband
Bank

Things to note: no trashing whatsoever; copious +Actions; only +Buy is Contraband and powered-up City.

What ended up happening in this game is basically, I and one opponent both assembled a Smithy engine with Contraband and Workshop to pick up components, and a couple of Banks and a Platinum. (The other opponent basically noodled around without a plan, but her presence did contribute to emptying piles and whatnot.) Emptying the Smithies meant we could mostly draw our decks using 3 or 4 Cities each but couldn't do much with the $30ish we were producing. We held off from greening for a while while we played chicken over emptying the Farming Villages; I managed to Workshop the last one in mid-turn to finally activate City's +buy, but didn't have enough buys to both take the lead and empty a third pile until two or three turns later (fortunately my opponent's engine stalled on the same turns mine did).

Was building a draw engine and then waiting for City to activate the right strategy here? Or would it have been more effective to just try and produce a Big Moneyish deck that could produce $11 on most turn and try to grab Colonies one at a time?

[JacquesTheBard]

It sounds like you had a three-player game. That's an interesting factor. No matter what, you'll want Smithies on this board, either for BM or for the engine. A large number of players makes this very appealing for Cities, because at least 1 pile is going to run. However, two-player games probably won't have this effect. Furthermore, even with one pile gone, Cities won't do much more than draw until much later. At the very end, they could be useful as sources of +buy, but that would probably be too late.

Quarry is one of my 5 favorite cards, but it needs either expensive actions or easy +buy to be worthwhile. Contraband isn't what you're looking for here, and most actions can come from workshop anyway. I personally wonder how BM-Smithy would make use of Bank. Obviously, Bank is beautiful with big hands, but how much of the money from those hands would just be wasted?

Hopefully, one of the forum's better players will be along soon with better commentary.

[dondon151]

Wow, so many splitters.

With a very high action density and most of them likely being some sort of village variant, Advisor can become a good drawing card to supplement Smithy. I don't know if Contraband is a mistake here, but I do think that Workshop is much more reliable at getting all the $4 cost cards. I feel like Contraband is very often going to get City proscribed, which is the only Action card that you can't gain via Workshop.

You can't play BM-Smithy in a Colony game; if you give your opponent all of the pile control, you will get ruined.

[JacquesTheBard]

Is pile control still important if you amass points early on?

[markusin]

Is pile control still important if you amass points early on?

In games without good ways to get multiple VP cards, it depends on how likely the BM deck can start picking up points and the rate that it can pick up VP. In this case, Smithy-BM is likely to be fairly slow in this Colony game. There may be enough time to build an engine of comparable speed with workshop, and then the extra pile control can be enough to lean towards engine.

Without attacks, I imagine BM has a chance to win here. On the other hand, 2 players going engine can power up cities fairly quickly even without the intervention of the Smithy-BM player.

And of course, with some good +buy the engine would dominate with it's pile control and VP surges.