Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #6—Closing Your Location

Before we jump in to Shannon Appelcline's latest strategy blog, we'd like to let you know that we're now offering promo cards from Rise of the Runelords and Skull & Shackles for sale here on paizo.com. These cards are not reprints—they are the very same printings that we shipped to subscribers a couple of years ago (so the cut and color of the RotR promos in particular is slightly different from the cards we print today). (So, why haven't we put up promos for newer sets? Being a subscriber has its privileges!)

This is the sixth installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read all the installments here.

The main goal for almost every Pathfinder Adventure Card Game location is closing it. Though you may send characters to locations due to other challenges or benefits inherent in them, closing conditions should weigh heavily in your decisions. But there's a flip side to closing locations: abandoning them. Sometimes you'll realize that a location just got much harder to close, and that should make you consider moving away from it. Closing and abandoning: they're the final yin and yang of working with locations in PACG.

Visit the Hard-to-Close Locations First

It may seem counterintuitive, but it's usually helpful to visit the hard-to-close locations first. If a character is going to need a high roll or a blessing to close out a location, go there first.

This is because you only want to close these locations, at whatever high cost or low odds, once. And you don't want to do it when you're concentrating on other things. If you visit a hard-to-close location first, then you should finish with it well before you're fighting the game's final villain, so you won't need to mess with it while you're also trying to collect together blessings to fight the villain, and you won't need to temporarily close it multiple times if the villain manages to escape.

(Yes, you might still face the villain early in the game, but if so he's going to get away anyway, so temporarily closing that hard-to-close location isn't a do-or-die requirement.)

Save the Impossible-to-Close Locations for Last

If a location is nearly impossible to close (because it doesn't correlate to the skills of your characters) or if it's undesirable to close (because it requires you to do something like banish a card or take damage), then follow Paul McCartney's advice: Let it be.

The reason is that you are less likely to find a villain in the early locations: at the start of a standard scenario, the odds of finding a villain at any random location are 1/(n+2) where n is the number of players. As you close locations, a random open location will be more likely to contain a villain, either because that's where the villain started or because that's where he fled to; by the time that it's possible to actually beat the villain, the odds of the villain being at the impossible-to-close location are 1/n, and the odds continue to increase as you close locations. And, if you defeat a villain at the location in question, then you don't have to close it via the normal means!

(Yes, you might still have to try and close that nasty, nasty location, but you're minimizing the odds as much as possible.)

Don't Close Locations You Don't Want to Close

Hold on a second, though. Do you actually want to close a location? There's no choice when you beat villains, but when you defeat a henchman you can decide whether or not you want to try.

Warning: No lifeguard on duty.

There are only a scant few situations where the answer might be no:

You might defer closing a location if you have no chance of closing it or if doing so might cause characters damage. For example, you might not close Junk Beach if you're unlikely to defeat the Poison Trap, because failing would damage you, and possibly your friends.

You might not close a location if you really want a type of card or even a specific card that you spied at that location.

There are also some situations that might strengthen your resolve not to close:

If a location deck contains just a few cards, there's less concern about finishing it off.

If you've already decided that you've lost the game, you might as well keep the location open if there's any reason to do so.

However, the answer should almost always be yes: you should usually close locations given the opportunity. Quite simply, if you choose not to close, then you've massively increased the odds that you're going to lose this session of play. So make sure that you understand that it's probably a trade-off versus winning the game.

Abandon Your Location If You Fail to Close It

Absent some of these reasons to stay at a location, when you beat a henchman and fail to close the location, you should also beat feet. That's because there's no longer a way to close the location early, which means that you're going to have to dig through the whole deck. Unless you really want the boons there, don't bother. You'd do better to go to another location that you might close easier, then return to the hench-less location only (1) when you need to be stationed there to temporarily close it to trap the villain or (2) after you chase the villain there, making it possible to close the location easily once more.

Abandon Your Location If You Chase Away the Villain

You should similarly abandon a location if you fight a villain there and lose. Yes, the fleeing villain could return to his original location, but unless it's the only location that was open, he might have gone somewhere else instead—and if he did, your current location just got really hard to close.

Imagine that you have two other open locations when you lose to the villain. Each of those other locations now has an average of 1.33 cards that can close the location: the deck's original henchman (there's your "1") and the 1-in-3 chance that the villain fled there (there's your ".33"). However, since the villain's original location didn't have a henchman, it now has only the possibility that the villain fled there, so it has an average of just .33 cards that can close the location. Obviously, that makes it less desirable, barring other factors.

Abandon Your Location If You Temporarily Closed It

There's one other closure-related reason that might lead you to abandon a location: when you temporarily closed it during a fight against a villain, and the villain fled somewhere else. Clearly you don't want to leave your temporarily closed location if you have enough coverage to close everything down again next time you fight the villain. But if you've still got one or two extra locations, then you'd do better to visit the locations that weren't closed. That's because the location you temporarily closed has just one card that can close the location: the henchman. But the n locations that were open when the villain fled have a higher average: the henchman and a 1/n chance of a villain.

Of course, you need to decide if you actually want to encounter the villain or not, and either go to the unclosed locations or not based on that decision.

Next time: Rolling your dice.

Shannon Appelcline

Game Historian