How to Win Board Games

Day 2 of Inkhaven: A surprisingly simple guide for winning a disparate variety of games, at least against other novices

Want to win new board games? There’s exactly one principle you need to learn:

1. Understand the win condition, and play to win.

That’s it. It’s that simple. Despite the simplicity, meditating on this principle alone can help you significantly elevate your gameplay and become much better at beating other novices.

The rest of the article will teach you the simplest ways you can apply this principle to a wide variety of games. Note that this is not an outline of a perfect strategy, but rather a “good enough” strategy for beating other novices¹.

Understanding the win condition

The first step is always: read the victory conditions carefully. Ask yourself: What triggers the game’s end? How do I score points? What’s the least number of turns I need to satisfy the win condition? Can I win more quickly than that?

Roughly speaking, there are 5 types of win conditions²:

1. Race conditions: First to X victory points (VPs) wins (Splendor, Settlers of Catan)

2. Accumulation conditions: Most points when the game ends wins (7 Wonders, Wingspan, Terraforming Mars)

3. Duel elimination - Win by killing your single opponent

4. Multiplayer elimination - Win by outlasting everyone else

5. Idiosyncratic win conditions - a large gamut of unusual win conditions³

Next, you play towards the win condition(s).

Playing to win

“Playing to win” sounds obvious, but next time you play a new game, record and introspect on how you actually play a new game! Chances are, you would optimize for everything except the win condition. You likely build elaborate engines that never score, make enemies unnecessarily, or pursue “interesting” strategies and clever combinations that are almost certainly too slow to achieve anything before the game inevitably ends.

Beelining towards the win condition

The simplest application of my principle is for games where winning means achieving X victory points first. In those games, usually your “good enough” strategy comes from doing whatever greedily leads you to the most victory points in the smallest number of turns possible. And then repeating this with the next small sequence of actions that leads you to the highest VP/turn ratio, and again and again a few more times before you win⁴.

For example, in Splendor, where the win condition is achieving 15 victory points, a good greedy heuristic is to reserve the card you see that has the highest VP:gem cost ratio, buy it as quickly as you can, and then try to reserve and/or buy the next card you see with the highest VP:gem cost ratio. Do this 3-5 times, and you win.

As a broad heuristic, this “simple beelining” strategy works best for games where either a) the end-game condition is via reaching X victory points first, or b) the game ends deterministically by Y turns, so you just have to have the most VPs by the time the game ends.

“Rush” strategies/Dual mandates

What if the game doesn’t end via either having reached some number of VPs first, or deterministically? What if a specific set of conditions must be triggered to end the game?

In those cases, a good “playing the win condition” player must acknowledge that the end condition is different from the win condition. They should invest in two different goals:

1. Getting as many VPs per turn as quickly as possible.

2. Ending the game as quickly as possible.

This is a dual mandate, so it’s harder to achieve than just going for one goal alone. So in those games, you might be tempted to avoid rushing altogether and instead go for a more complex “engine” strategy where your goal is to achieve a viable economy, etc that lets you eventually achieve a lot of victory points by the end of the game, even if you initially don’t get any.

This is usually a mistake. Not always, but usually, especially for beginning players. But what happens if you do go for an engine? For that, see the next section:

Source: Gemini 2.5 Pro

The endgame starts earlier than you think

In an earlier draft of this post, somebody objected to my framing, saying that an important strategic aspect of advanced play in a lot of board games is timing the transition between a middle-game (accumulating resources, improving your economy, building up production, etc) and endgame (where you’re just maximizing points).

I don’t necessarily disagree. However, I think beginner, intermediate, and even some advanced players are consistently biased in overestimating how long the middle-game should be:

2. Linch’s Law of Endgames: You should start the endgame earlier than you think you should, even after taking Linch’s Law into effect.

I claim this is a real bias rather than a random mistake/error or “skill issue” as the kids say. You can in fact imagine the opposite issue: people bias too much towards the endgame/victory conditions and don’t invest enough resources into building up their engine. You can imagine it, yet in practice I almost always see people systematically biased in favor of spending too much time on engines, and almost never too much time spent on trying to win.

More broadly, you should “aim more directly towards victory” more than you currently do, even after taking this advice into account.

However, ‘playing to win’ looks different depending on win conditions. In elimination games, for example, playing to win centrally means playing to not lose.

Playing to not lose

In multiplayer elimination games (Coup, multi-player fighting games) the objective is to be the last person standing. Some people interpret this as a mandate to be maximally aggressive and to try to kill off all their opponents as soon as possible. This is a mistake.

Instead, you should play to not lose: play in a way to attract as little aggression as possible. Among novices, this means playing quiet moves, not being spooky, avoiding making enemies, flying under the radar etc. Among intermediate to advanced players, you should assume everybody always (or almost always) makes the locally optimal decision, so you should play to position yourself in a manner that it is never rational for you to be anybody’s first target of choice.⁵

This means taking game theory seriously, being less wealthy than other players, seeming (and often being) locally less of a threat etc.

In politics games, take Statecraft seriously, and avoid being a Great Game loser by seeming like too much of a threat.

Choosing between beelining towards victory vs playing to not lose

This is complicated, but here are some broad heuristics:

Usually when there’s minimal player interaction and no player elimination you should beeline towards victory. Other players are novices and are far from optimal. Worrying about them is often going to hurt your own game. Instead, you should spend your limited time and attention improving your own game.

In the other extreme, in multi-player elimination games, you should focus the vast majority of your attention, especially in the beginning, on “not losing.” In those games, the best offense is a studious defense. Damaging an opponent increases your win probability some, but much less than being damaged will decrease your win probability.

In a two-player perfect information duel elimination game like chess, you should pay approximately equal attention to beelining towards victory (checkmating your opponent) and playing to not lose (avoid being checkmated). In those games specifically, my impression is that most people systematically neglect thinking from their opponent’s perspective, and play too much of what Sarah Paine calls “half-court tennis.”⁶

Against other strategies for winning

I contrast my “playing to win via aiming at the win condition” strategy for winning against other common strategies that people either employ or advise. I think all of the other strategies have their place, but are substantially worse for new players.

Against Central Narrative strategies

The most common strategy that people implicitly employ when learning a new game is what I call the “Central Narrative” strategy – understand the Central Narrative of a game, and try to execute it better than anybody else.

For Dominion, this means buying lots of cards and playing lots of actions that combo well with each other. For Splendor, this might mean buying lots of gem mines and being more locally efficient with your purchases than anybody else. For fighting games, this might mean executing lots of cool attacks and attacking your opponents head-on. For Coup and other social deception games, this might mean lying a lot and calling out your opponents on their BS. And so forth.

I think this is bad advice for people trying to win, since presumably other players are trying almost the exact same strategy. If you win despite everybody else doing the same thing, it means you’re some combination of:

1. Smarter than everybody else

2. Care more about winning than everybody else

3. Have more experience with this game/games in general than everybody else

4. Luckier than everybody else

None of these traits are repeatable strategies you can rely on. “Git gud” is not actionable advice. I prefer strategies that are both easier to apply and more nontrivial.

Against Psychology Players

Some people advise trying to learn what your opponents want to do, and then systematically foiling their plans (Sun Tzu: “what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy”). Good advice for some generals in 5th century BC China, terrible advice for most modern board games. This is because a) psychology is hard, b) your opponents are novices, so foiling their plans might well backfire, and c) wasting your cognition worrying about your opponents’ strategies is going to hurt your own gameplay (especially in multi-player games with 3+ players).

Against “Optimal” Players

Some people advise learning what the best players in a game do (or even what’s theoretically proven or simulated to be mathematically or computationally optimal) and then copy the best moves possible.

I think this is terrible advice since the best strategies for beginners to play might be very different from what is theoretically the most optimal play from the best strategists.

When to not use this advice

You should avoid this advice if you are currently winning too often, and think winning is not fun. You should also disregard this advice if you don’t mind winning, but find playing to win morally or aesthetically distasteful.

This might sound dismissive, but I mean it most sincerely. We all want to have fun in our games, and if winning (or winning in specific ways) is not fun for you, please don’t change your gameplay just based on some rando’s Substack post!

Finally, you should downgrade my advice if you tried to implement it multiple times and you were less successful at achieving your desired goals (whether winning, having fun, or something else) than when you were following other advice, or using your own base intuitions.

Conclusion

To recap, find the win condition, think carefully about what the win condition entails, and then aim every chip, card, or cube at it, and start the sprint earlier than feels safe.

Taking this advice seriously will mean that you’d almost always win against other novices – at least until they Get Good and they follow similar advice. Good luck!

And please, feel free to subscribe! And if you do end up trying out my advice, please comment! I would love to get more data on whether my advice is directly applicable to real games.

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Today is Day 2 of Inkhaven, where I publish a blog post every day! Last post I published at 8AM in the morning, this post I published at 11pm! Wish me luck for the next one!

1. Indeed, a well-designed game shouldn’t have an obvious strategic equilibrium as simple as the one I describe.

2. I try my best to explain strategies in a way that’s agnostic to specific games. But sometimes I find concrete examples helpful! Unfortunately I expect most readers to not have heard of the vast majority of the specific games referenced, and also I don’t think it’s worth the readers’ time to be explained specific game rules! Such is life.

3. For example, in Blood on the Clock Tower, Good wins by killing the Demon. Evil wins by having only two players alive, one of which is the Demon. In Innovation (and to a lesser degree, CCGs like Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc) there are many “special cards” that can trigger different unusual win conditions.

4. Does this sound way too simple to be the best possible strategy for such a broad class of games? Sure. Does that mean it’s not the best possible strategy for most games? Also true. But surprisingly I found it to be “good enough” to beat most novices in large numbers of games, such that beating this simple greedy strategy often requires much more strategic depth, understanding, deep thinking, etc than needed to execute this strategy, or simple variations thereof.

5. Coup players may enjoy my earlier Medium article here: https://medium.com/@draconlord/coup-card-game-strategy-the-3-player-endgame-b87cd90a17af

6. An earlier version of this post tried to more carefully delineate which of my advice was board game-specific, vs apply to the “Game” of life more generally. In the end, I decided that while the broader topic (“to what extent is good advice for board games good advice for Real Life”) can be very sophisticated and interesting, I couldn’t do the topic enough justice while still talking about my core points. So I cut most of the comparisons.