Key Takeaways

First player advantage

No consistent first player advantage is observed, for any player count. Differences are slightly higher when strong players play against medium players in favour of the player going first, but this is not significant.

Between a third (for 2-player games) and a fifth (for 5-player games) of the games have no lead change. In games where this does occur, players behind in Prestige by up to 8 points have about 50% chance of recovering and winning the game in 2-player games. The chance of a comeback to win the game coming from a non-wining position decreases with the number of players.

There is no variation on Prestige point difference during the game between the first and the second player on games of different player counts. In 5-player games, it’s usual to observe a difference of 20 points between the players with most and least Prestige points.

Player Factions

Different factions show different winning rates, with ‘Ministers B’ showing up as significantly better than any other, winning 65.50% of the games played and achieving more than 40 points on average across all games (2-player games). For other player counts, ‘Ministers B’ is still the strongest faction, winning the majority of games. This is followed by ‘Tinkerers B’ in all player counts, but with a difference of 10% fewer victories than ‘Ministers B’. See the Player Win Rate -> By Player Faction for more details.

Adding factions to the game does not fundamentally change the data when playing with no factions (shown in the Phase 1 Report). Some minor changes include:

  1. A slight reduction on the use of the Gather Ichor action in favour of the respective faction action.
  2. An increase of game ends triggered by fully constructing the tower (from 6.96% to 18.7% in 2-player games).

Mission cards

Missions with higher Prestige rewards are preferred by winning players, but some with strong effects stand out as well, such as “Ruined Totem”, “Forced Cooperation” and (less pronounced) “Improvisation”. The strength of these cards is consistent across all player counts. Across all player counts, the following are the strongest mission cards: “Long-term strategy”, “Offer of Protection”, “Crusade”, “Saplings”, “Ruined Totem” and “Lucky Trophy”.

The analysis on resources spent in Mission Cards reveal that in general better cards (those with higher winning rates) cost the highest amount of resources. An exception to this is ‘Improvisation’, which costs 8 resources while achieving a moderate 50-60% winning rate (for 2-player and 3-player games). No mission card stands out as being particularly cheap with a high strength.

Locations and Tower Rooms

“The Ridge” tower room is consistently, for all player counts, the room that when built provides the highest chances of victory. This is followed by “The Abbys”, in all player counts being the second best.

“The Grove” board location has the highest win rate for all player counts. “The Isle” and “The Nest” alternate as the two board locations with the lowest win rates for all player counts.

“The Stroboscope” excavation site is the strongest location for all player counts, followed by “The Rig”, which is the second best in all variants.

No particular tactic card seems to be specially strong. “Unforeseen Changes” always appears at the top 3 of the table for all player counts.

Actions and Resources

Gather Ichor is the most used default action in the game, accounting for between 34-36% of all main player actions in their turn (for all player counts). Faction Actions are in last place in frequency of usage for all player counts.

Analysis on two actions played in combination on the same turn does not reveal any pair particularly strong, both during the game and as opening moves. Overall, being able to Collect and then Place (via council track, tactic, mission, or other effect rather than a straight Place action) is a strong combination whenever possible. See GameProgression -> Action Sets for more details.

Better players tend to gather more Artifacts during the game. This is consistent for all player counts.

Game end

The majority of 2-player games (81%) end with players reaching 40 Prestige. For 3 to 5-player games this end condition decreases in frequency: in 3-player games less than half games end by reaching the maximum prestige, while in 5-player games only 15% of the games finish this way. Naturally, the complementary is true: the higher the number of players in the game, the most likely is that the game ends when the tower is fully constructed. The number of ties decreases when augmenting the number of players (from 1.85% of the games ending with a tie-breaker in 2-player games, to 0.22% in 5-player games).

Games tend to be shorter as the number of players increases.

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Game Overview