Hi All,
TacTile is a game with simple rules but complex strategy. This guide is intended to give you the tools you need to understand how to win. We will focus mainly on 2P strategy in this guide. This strategy guide is broken down into 5 sections. It is assumed that you already know the rules of the game - if you do not you can find a rulebook on BGG search TacTile or a walkthrough video on the Friendly Bee Game Company Youtube channel.
Sections:
1. Action Cards
2. Positioning Strategy or Color Strategy
3. Turn Management
4. Tips for Offense (condensed)
5. Tips for Defense (condensed)
Action Cards
There are 3 different action cards, each one serves a specific purpose and has varied usefulness throughout the various phases of the game. It is important to understand that each situation is unique and depending on the board and your opponent it may make sense to break from this general advice.
1. Move Cards - move cards give you the ability to take another movement once activated. This is useful to advance on the goal and trigger additional cards. Move cards can be thought of as a 'win condition' card. The more moves you have the easier it will be to score. The drawback of move cards is that they do nothing to affect your opponent. It may be helpful to think of them as a short term benefit - they help you score points but don't give you any game control. In the late game players will typically compete to buy as many moves as possible but committing to moves too early may give your opponent the opportunity to force you into bad situations later on if you haven't built out your support engine. However in general investing in move cards is considered consistently valuable throughout the game.
2. Gain Cards - gain cards give you the ability to gain a resource - these free resources increase the pace at which you are able to acquire cards. The earlier you can buy gain cards the more time you have to recoup their value making them powerful early game cards. Gain cards are critical cards for TacTile strategy because they allow you to take control of the card market - buying all the good cards as soon as they appear. The drawback of gain cards is they do nothing to affect your board positioning (allowing you to move or push opponents). They can be thought of as investments for the future and if you invest too much too early you may lose the game before being able to cash in. Additionally you can only buy a maximum of one card per turn so after 2 gain cards they begin to diminish in value - though having gains on multiple colors gives you a lot of flexibility in the late game. (with Overdrive you can exhaust 2 actions to perform multiple BUY actions in one turn removing this diminishing value - therefore stacking gains of one color is extremely powerful in Overdrive).
3. Push Cards - push cards allow you to push an opponents pawn (or an ally's in 4P). This is the most challenging card to use correctly. On a surface level push cards allow you to simply push your opponent back - slowing them down which is good for you. However the real power in these cards is how they allow you to push your opponent away from the tiles they need to activate their cards. We call this being placed in 'jail' and it is potentially devastating allowing you to deny an opponent some or all of their tableau. Because the value of a push card is dependent on how much of your opponents tableau you can deny to them, they have increasing value as the game goes on (they are mid-late game cards that gain value as your opponent builds a larger tableau). The drawback of push cards is that their benefit can depend on board position (some places are easier to jail than others - which your opponent may try to avoid). At the end of the day while you'll still need moves to score, throwing someone in jail is often how games are won.
My advice: Don't overthink it, my favorite early game engine is one of each!
Positioning Strategy or Color Strategy
While you are considering which type of Action Card will bring you the most benefit you need to also be considering the color of the card. No matter the Action card if you cannot activate it, it brings you no benefit. What do we mean by activate? Action cards activate on matching colored tiles - so moving onto a red tile will activate all the red action cards you own. There are 2 key color considerations for action cards - map dispersion and tableau concentration.
1. Map Dispersion - You want to invest in tile colors that you can easily find on your path to the enemy base. If you invest in red cards you will want to regularly move on red tiles to recoup their benefit. If you only have red tiles around your home base (an early game position) - then when you try to go to the enemy base in the mid/late game suddenly you can't activate any cards. However if you only invest in colors near your enemies base (an end game position) you may find it hard to get any benefit in the early and middle game - thus losing before you have a chance to take advantage of your engine.
2. Tableau Concentration - the obvious solution to the above problem is to simply buy cards of every color - but its much harder to combo cards on many different colors. Any card you buy that you aren't activating is useless, so you must carefully consider the risk vs reward of diversifying your colors. Having action cards of many colors will give you less activations per turn but more reliable activation, and having only few different colors of action cards will give you more activations per turn but higher risk of no activations on a turn. Its up to you to determine your level of risk!
Finding your path: my strategy on picking colors is to try to find a connected path of 2 or maybe 3 colors from my base to my opponents - then I focus on investing in those colors. This is a good way to continually advance while still using my cards. Be wary that the public information of your cards will give your opponent insight into where you plan to go. Keep an eye out for areas of strategic importance and make sure to secure them early!
Turn Management
There are many possible decisions to make on a TacTile turn and each card you add to your tableau increases that decision space rapidly. The following turn management tips can help you simplify your choices and ensure you are getting the full value out of your turn.
1. Group your cards by color - all cards of the same color will always activate at the same time, group them by color so you don't forget to activate any of your cards.
2. Use your card's position to keep track of its activation state - Once a card is activated it stays active that turn until it is used. As you gain more cards you'll need a physical reminder of what actions are available to you - having three different card positions will help you remember what actions are not active, activated, and exhausted. I recommend placing your cards in a horizontal line in front of you (baseline or not active state). As you activate your cards you can advance them (push them up to show they are activated) and after use twist them to show exhaustion.
3. Plan your turn with purchasing in mind - Many new players rush to start activating their cards at the start of their turn and then buy whatever cards they can with the resources they end up with. This type of reactive turn play will usually not give you an engine that makes it easy to win. You should always start your turn with the question (what do I want to buy?) then try to get those resources while activating as many cards as you can along the way. In the end game once you have a powerful engine you can start focusing purely on advancement but early/mid you want to prioritize building your engine while also advancing.
Tips for Offense (Condensed)
If you are having long games and finding it hard to win consider the following tips:
1. Buy move cards - especially in colors that show up near your opponents base.
2. Don't overindex on gains - you shouldn't need more than 2-3 (unless you are playing overdrive in which case go crazy)
3. Try to concentrate the colors of cards you are buying - stick to 1-2 colors (it makes it easy to activate your cards).
4. Try to maximize how many cards you activate each turn (even if it means moving in weird directions) - this is a game of action economy the player that is activating more cards on average tends to win.
5. Pressure is critical - make sure you are advancing down the board - don't get stay too long in one area just because its easy to activate your combos. The psychological impact to your opponent caused by you nearing their base is more valuable than you think.
Tips for Defense (Condensed)
If you are having short games and find yourself losing to opponents that are rushing you consider the following tips:
1. Make sure you buy a gain early - someone rushing you likely doesn't have any gains - use your gain to take control of the market later on. If you can also get a push on the same color the gain/push combo is really hard to blitz into.
2. Physically block your opponent - someone rushing you is probably relying on moves on just a few colors - put your pieces on those colors and get in their way. This is one of the single most effective defensive tactics.
3. Buy the cards they want - pay attention to your opponents resources, buy the cards they want or reset so they cant get them (careful with the resets though - only do this in dire situations).
4. Limit their moves - Try to stop your opponent from getting moves on different colors - its much easier to block someone from one or two colors than all 4!
5. Let them score - remember your opponent is weakest once they've scored a pawn - try to separate their pawns and let them score one, then focus your attention on their remaining pawn which you will find is much easier to trap with your two pieces.
This strategy guide is just the basics there are many more tips and tricks that I'm sure you'll uncover as you dive into TacTile! Best of luck!
Part 2: Overdrive
Overdrive is the expansion ruleset for tactile. It is a simple rule adjustment that allows you to exhaust 2 actions for a free action of your choice - but this small change has a massive impact on game strategy. Overdrive essentially allows you to put the full weight of your engine behind whichever task is most valuable at the moment (attacking, defending, or scaling). While this new rule might be a bit challenging to wrap your head around - it more than makes up for it in additional game flexibility and depth which is why it is recommended for new and experienced players alike.
Recommended Setup Adjustment:
Overdrive increases the snowball potential of a game which tends to exaggerate first player advantage - to combat this I recommend an adjusted setup "starts or sides". Basically player one decides if they'd like to go first 'starts' or choose their starting position 'sides'. For the player who chooses 'sides' you reveal the card market and then they are allowed to pick which of the 4 corners they'd like to start in (their opponent must play diagonal to them). However their opponent will be going first. In practice 'starts or sides' has yielded a 50/50 win rate under overdrive rules.
How to use Overdrive in Practice
Overdrive has 3 main uses: Attacking, defending, scaling.
Attacking: (Converting your actions to moves) this is the simplest benefit of overdrive to understand. Simply convert any actions that aren't moves into moves at a 2:1 ratio. This will allow you to score quickly and win. This is basically the end game state of every overdrive game. A key watchout here is that if you start converting everything into moves too early you will be killing your scaling - mistiming when to begin the endgame can have disastrous consequences.
Defending: (converting your actions into pushes) defense continues to be the most slept on aspect of the game - even more so because overdrive makes it easier than ever to escape jail (you can overdrive any card + a basic action to turn it into a move and escape a jail position). However the players that have the game vision to spot timely jail positions & overdrive into pushes will gain massive action economy. This is extremely critical in the late game - you will likely have to convert much of your engine into pushes to save any losing position. A valuable tip is to count your opponents moves (including the actions they could convert into moves at a 2:1 rate) and count the tiles it will take them to score to get a sense if its possible for them to win on the next turn - this will tell you when to switch from scaling/offense to defense.
Scaling: (converting your actions into gains/buys) Scaling is the true magic of overdrive. In classic the BUY basic action has always been a limiter - no one could purchase more than one card a turn. This meant having more than 2 gains had diminishing returns. In overdrive you can now convert actions into BUYS removing the card purchasing limit and creating unlimited scale potential. This makes gain cards more critical than ever - getting an early gain advantage can quickly be snowballed into a massive card advantage which can then be converted into moves for a quick win. The counter to this is that gains ultimately don't provide any positional benefit - a smart opponent will play aggressive and not give you time to set up a massive snowball engine.
As always the dominant strategy is to find that right balance of offense/defense/ and scaling while keeping an eye to the positioning/color strategy of the board. Good luck exploring overdrive! In my games I've found that there is a right time and place for each of these 3 core elements in every game - if you find yourself only using one or two I recommend trying to find situations to use all 3 and build that game vision muscle.
