Netherlands
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I've played - and won - two games (2 and 3 player) in which the entirety of my strategy was: For the first part of the game place only disconnected walls to bring out as many towers as possible, and when cities are finished don't score at all, instead always opting to discard a non-tower card for two new cards and then (as I'll be placed last) exchanging all my non-tower cards for new cards. Once I have a large number of tower cards in my hand, start scoring, 14-20 points per card, and blow right past the other players before triggering the end of the game. The only meaningful choice for me would be whether to try to help form a mega city (if the majority of my tower cards were on walls), or to try and keep that from happening.
My opponents were helpless to stop me, and we're now pretty convinced that the game is 'broken'. If they'd opt for the same strategy, the game would become pure luck (whoever draws enough tower cards first, wins), but there doesn't seem to be any effective strategy they could follow to stop me. The best we could come up with would be creating many very small cities so that there'd be no free-standing towers and few free-standing houses, denying themselves points in order to deny me even more points. This'd seem to require the other players to work together to be effective, though, while I could still play for creating a mega city with lots of towers on its walls and win like that.
Obviously there's the danger of relatively new players proclaiming a game "broken" due to not seeing all the subtleties in it, but this strategy certainly sucked the joy out of playing for everyone involved, and seems very hard to counter.
We might houserule the catch-up mechanism to only allow exchanging a maximum of 2 cards or somesuch, but personally I don't think that'd manage to bring the game back in our graces.
Anyone who's been in this situation and found a way to the other side where the game was a lighthearted fun filler again, I'd be very pleased to hear from you!
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Todd Redden
United States
Manchester
Connecticut
"Don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church."
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Towers does seem to be the way to go, and I don't think there is a useful counter-strategy either. Some scoring cards are utterly useless and should never be redeemed. We always have fun playing it, but I'm always certain luck has a lot to do with victory in this game.
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United States
Danbury
Connecticut
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You've already identified the effective counter to your strategy - form small cities so there are fewer free-standing towers. Also, going into the game with the intent to basically just 'draw all the tower scoring cards' seems to be a non-starter, given competent play by your opponents. I contend they're not paying attention.
That said, this is not a super-strategic game. It's light and has luck, but you're just trying to influence & mitigate where you can. I've always enjoyed my plays.
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Carl Olson
United States
Connecticut
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The other counter is for the other players to not score either while building small cities. Then everyone gets the same number of chances to draw tower cards. Restricting how many cards you can exchange doesn't affect this type of game.
If your opponents are forming small cities, and you are not, they will be drawing more of the tower-in-a-city cards from the first run-through of the deck than you, because the person who creates a scoring city draws first. Once the deck is reshuffled, there will be no more tower cards to draw, and your freestanding tower cards will be near worthless.
At that point, *on the average* the tower cards should not be unbalancing, and scoring will be mostly determined by how many other features you can score. Masons has never been chess, although there is a much smaller luck factor than its detractors claim.
You may as well deal all the cards out at the start. Then when someone scores, the scoring cards will generally get passed to another player.
So broken? I don't think so. But it is definitely a much different game than the designer intended.
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United States
Danbury
Connecticut
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If one player has free-standing tower cards and the other players (2 or 3 others) do not, they should be making small cities of 1, 2, or 3 spaces. It's obvious when you see a player building walls that are not connected to any existing walls, that they are trying to maximize free-standing towers. Likewise when you see them building up & down the coast, seeking to maximize free-standing coastal towers (2 points each, regardless of color!).
This is a huge alarm bell for the other players to begin incorporating those towers into small cities, whether they choose to score them or not.
Now, in a 3-player game, sometimes two players have the same free-standing tower card at the same time. When this happens, the third player is screwed, at least for that scoring round, because 4 free-standing towers could be going up each time around the board. But still, he can create a small city and minimize his opponents' scoring. I've seen people come back from being in last place by 20 points and be in contention for the end game.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the single most important facet of Masons is having a good scoring hand at the game's end. Being able to forecast when the game will end is very important - if you blow all your good cards and have nothing but junk for the final scoring round, you will almost certainly lose.
Bottom line, you must pay attention to the actions of your opponents, whether to predict what scoring cards they're going for, or to know when the game is likely to end. That's the point of building these shared structures on the board.
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