Today’s Welcome to Centerville Strategy Tips article is from Robert Crowter-Jones, the writer behind ElusiveMeeple, a wonderful and useful site that provides both reviews and strategy tips for a wide variety of boardgames. Robert has reviewed Welcome to Centerville in some depth and written strategy tips for the game on his blog (see the ElusiveMeeple site). For strategy tips on Triumph and Tragedy, 1960: The Making of the President, Time of Crisis, Churchill, Fire in the Lake, Here I Stand (2-Player), and Thunder Alley, see his InsideGMT articles here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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So if you haven’t tried Welcome to Centerville, it brings a lot of new combinations of mechanics to a board game and yet packs it into a really interesting game that’s a lot deeper than you might think. Check out my review for more thoughts on how the game plays.

Otherwise, check out my thoughts on the best approaches to the game:

During the Game

Diversity: Don’t got all out for one strategy – you need to balance two tracks in this game, and that means that throughout the game you should be balancing the two strategies. Gain wealth through the town and prestige through the river, or the reverse or some other combination. However, be careful not to double down on wealth in one whole round and leave you chasing certain dice outcomes later – this will restrict you and make it less likely you can succeed.

City Spread: It can feel important to win a city area, but what is truly important is that you don’t lose two areas. In other words, winning in one area is helpful to getting your score up, but with -3 for each place you finish last then you should be careful not to finish last in the two zones which are both prestige or both wealth. That would be a total of -6 and this is ultimately much worse!

Town & Country: Park benches are great – +1 in every region. However, when you go for these every turn then you miss the opportunity to balance the trees at the top / the mayors offices or indeed the town. This route to getting a moderate score will cost you too many turns / too many dice during the game. So you will need to balance the park bench strategy with the actual placement of level 1 or level 2 buildings (you probably won’t need level 3).

Extra Turn: One of the offices provides an extra turn – this is the most powerful one in the game and you should always grab this early if possible. Use the “?” or the ticks to get into that office and secure it. Extra dice are great!

Avoiding Disaster: Its a random distribution of bad events but tell new players what these are and who they effect. Leaving them to find out can be deeply unfair and ruin an early game. Once you know these, don’t over-reach in these strategies and become reliant on that disaster not happening.

Status: Flip the status early – it’s more powerful to have this for more scoring phases during the game but the cost never changes! Look out for these types of opportunities to score points multiple times in the game (think about the town too!).

Little & Often: There are multiple scoring phases. Yes the final scoring phase has some additional ways to score points, but normally the player leading in the regular scoring is either first or second in the final score – keep scoring little and often.

Villas & Trees: This is an end game strategy that relies on the value of the villas, but make the most of it by scoring trees early and then getting lots of river tiles every turn. Not one to do by halves, but a good way to make lemonade from lemons if you roll trees!

A View from the Bridge: The bridge is great – scores on both tracks – but it’s a lot of dice and you will score less here than if you score on both sides of the river. I would recommend scoring lots on a varied strategy rather than both in the centre spot (for a harder dice roll!)

Stealing: This isn’t multiplayer solitaire. You will vie for control of the offices, but the favors will also allow you to steal the education tiles off another player. This could cost them as the end game closes in – reducing points for sets of one type or (and more commonly) sets for variation. Stealing that crucial tile can cost lot’s of points and from a track that they are behind on!

Good Luck!