Albion Patriotic has a strong economy that can be hard to jumpstart. There’s no question that it can make a lot of coin. Also, Albion Patriotic has power for days. But how do you get your economy going and your point total up before everyone else is ending the game? I discovered this Albion Patriotic sequence while preparing for a recent tournament. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Patriotic Player Mat.
The Patriotic Player Mat starts a player off with 2 Popularity and 6 Coin with a turn priority of 3. It’s a powerful economy mat because the highest coin totals are tied to Deploy and Enlist, which are the most powerful bottom row actions in the game. The deploy is expensive, however, making upgrades useful even when a player is not playing for the upgrade star.
The top row actions above Deploy and Enlist are useful as well. The Patriotic player mat gives the player Bolster above Deploy and Produce above Enlist. Bolster above Deploy ensures you will have plenty of power to use both to safeguard your economy and to go on the offensive. Produce above Enlist cuts down on the number of necessary turns as you can produce and Enlist in the same turn.
Suggested Strategy:
For the Patriotic mat, it’s best that you prioritize your Enlist and Mech Stars. The Power Star can also be an added bonus if you can get an Upgrade to increase the Bolster action. Having these options helps a lot if you have a difficult Objective.
Albion Patriotic Star Strategy.
I don’t recommend starting a game without considering what Stars you want to achieve. For those unfamiliar, Stars give Victory Points, and the first player to Six Stars ends the game.
Upgrade Star.
Aside from getting an upgrade or two, we don’t have plans so go after this Star.
Mech Star.
Albion has powerful Mechs and the Patriotic player mat gives a ton of coin for the Deploy action. We want to go for the Mech star in every game as Albion Patriotic.
Build Star.
The Build action is below our Trade action; however, with no immediate access to Lumber, and the high Lumber cost of the Build action, it just seems like it would take more effort to make this work than it’s worth. And it gives us no coin. No Build Star for us.
Enlist Star.
Albion Patriotic is geared to Enlist. Albion starts with easy access to a farm, which is right next to their Village hex. Meaning, even without a speed Mech, workers can quickly get to a farm and Produce Food for Enlists. The Patriotic mat has the Enlist action right below the Produce action. Enlist is one of the most powerful bottom row actions in the game. Not only that, but the Patriotic mat gives us the second most coin for Enlists. We want this star.
Worker Star.
In the course of all our necessary Produce actions, it won’t be difficult to gain our eight workers, so we’ll go for this one. The Worker star synergizes with our desire to spread and conquer as much territory as possible. Also, we are going to need these workers to run our engine anyway.
Objective Star.
Objectives are always on the table. We should be able to work our game around getting one completed. If not, we’ll know at the start of the game that we have to make some adjustments.
Combat Star(s).
We’ll always have these as a focus. You are going to need two. With power and cards, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Popularity Star.
Albion Patriotic starts with only 2 Popularity. Absent an extremely long game AND a popularity factory card, there is no way this star is in Albion Patriotic’s future.
Power Star.
We’ll have the potential to gain the Power Star, but we are going to need an upgrade on an encounter that we can apply to the bolster action. Even then, we may need power off an encounter, an extra bolster, or power from neighbor upgrades. We’ll say maybe to the Power Star.
All in all, playing Albion Patriotic, we’re going to focus on our Mech, Enlist, Objective, Combat (2), and Worker Stars. The power star is unlikely, so we need a good objective.
Albion Patriotic Objective Strategy.
Getting an Objective is important for us to get our 6th Star. Because of this, we really need to have a solid plan going into the game of how we can accomplish one of the Objectives we get; and if we can’t, knowing right away that we’ll have to adjust our gameplan.
For this game, we received “Northern Advantage” and “Divide and Conquer.”
Northern Advantage.
“Control at least three Tundra territories at the end of your turn” to complete. Territory objectives can be tough for Albion. Their slow movement makes it difficult to occupy multiples of a given hex. However, Tundras are probably the easiest for us. We have one near our home base, another on a tunnel adjacent to our village, and there is a second Tunnel Tundra, making the needed territories relatively accessible to us.
Divide and Conquer.
“Have 0 Factory cards and control at least 2 territories adjacent to the Factory at the end of your turn,” to complete. This is another “occupy” movement based Objective for Albion. This one nearly impossible unless the game goes long. It would require us to occupy two territories a long distance from our base with no speed mech. Additionally, as slow as we move, we might have to fight combats to claim these spaces. On top of all that, we cannot claim a factory card before turning in this objective, something we would love to do if we make it as far as the factory.
Overall, considering both Objectives, we’ll lean toward completing Northern Advantage. It will be easier and won’t require the game to go as long or require us to pass on an opportunity to get a factory card.
For a more informative look into Objectives, check out our Objective Cards Strategy overview.
Strategy Overview.
Albion is slow. So we want to quickly get enough workers to strengthen our economy and get our Rally Mech quickly to help us move those workers. Meanwhile, we want our Hero to try to grab both nearby encounters as quickly as possible and see if those can boost our turn sequence. After that, it’s going to be focusing on movement, Enlists, and Mechs. Sadly, those are each their own column, so that’ll add some turns. But not much to do about that. Let’s see how it goes!
Albion Patriotic Step by Step Strategy.
Objectives: Northern Advantage. Divide and Conquer.
Before First Encounter
- TRADE: 2 Oil.
- MOVE: Hero to Farm and Farm Worker to the Village. UPGRADE: Move and Enlist
- TRADE: 2 Food.
- PRODUCE: 1 Metal and 1 Worker. ENLIST: Deploy action and Combat Card bonus
- TRADE: 2 Oil
- PRODUCE: 1 Metal and 2 Workers
- MOVE: Place two Village Workers on the Adjacent Farm and Move the Hero to either Encounter (the Tundra Encounter is better if it is safe). Don’t forget to drop a flag! UPGRADE: the Produce Action and the Deploy Action
- Encounter: We want an Upgrade, Oil, or Metal. Barring that, Power would be helpful.
- We received Encounter 25 and chose to pay 2 Popularity for 1 upgrade and any 2 Resources. We upgraded Bolster and Deploy and took 2 Metal.
Set Up Engine
- BOLSTER: DEPLOY: Place Rally on the Village (Normally we would Produce this turn. But due to our Encounter, we can go ahead and Bolster, placing our Rally Mech on the Village. We’ll save our Produce action for Turn 9.)
- PRODUCE: 2 Food, 1 Metal, 2 Workers. ENLIST: Combat Card Recruit and Popularity Bonus. (We spent 2 Popularity on the Encounter so we have to take this bonus to continue producing.)
- Bolster: DEPLOY: Place Shield Either on the Farm or the Mountain to Protect Workers. This is situational, but it is generally better to protect the mountain since produced Food is immediately spent.
- MOVE: Use the Rally ability to move 3 Workers from the Village to the Mountain, move the Character to the Encounter. As we only need 3 more Metal, we can move 1 of 4 workers on the Mountain to the flagged Tundra for extra territory and towards our Objective.
- Encounter: We have all the resources we need, However, with only three upgrades left, oil makes the upgrade star a possibility. Power might make the power star possible.
- We received Encounter 18 and chose to pay $2 to take 3 oil. (Don’t forget the Flag!) We now have the resources to UPGRADE: our Combat Card action and Deploy action. (Even though we will have enough metal, upgrading Deploy makes it more likely we will be able to do the bottom row action for coins if we Bolster, maybe for the Power star, after Deploying all of our Mechs.)
Finish Bottom Row Actions
- BOLSTER: DEPLOY: We take either remaining mech and place it on the Farm
- PRODUCE: 3 Metal, 2 Food, and 1 Worker. ENLIST: Power or Popularity Recruit base on which one is most likely to receive bonuses from our neighbors. Take the Power bonus.
- BOLSTER: DEPLOY: We place our last Mech on the Village. This allows us to Burrow to the Tunnel and bring one or more workers with us. (Luckily, a neighbor upgrade pushes us to 16 power, giving us the Power star.)
- PRODUCE: ENLIST: We take our last Enlist and the two coin bonus.
We have 4 stars including the Mech star, Enlist star, Power star, and Worker star. Our objective only requires one movement action. We could end the game with 1 Combat. Unfortunately, no players are within striking distance.
End the Game
- MOVE: We move our Hero to the Tundra Tunnel (drop a flag), a Mountain Mech with two Workers to the Tundra Tunnel, and one Tundra Tunnel Worker to the south Tundra Tunnel. This gives us our third Tundra UPGRADE: Trade and Build. We turn in our objective.
A note about going to 5 stars: Getting a 5th star can be dangerous if we are not in the lead. Another player that is ahead of us can attack us and throw the combat to force us to end the game. We can always throw 0 power and 0 combat cards to prevent this. But we lose valuable positioning doing this and if they are at 5 stars they might end the game, which could put us in a no-win situation. In this case, we are well ahead on score and feel comfortable going to 5 stars.
- DEPLOY: We can’t move this turn and have no bottom row actions to complete. We skip the Bolster since we are at maximum Power and turn in 1 Metal for 4 coins.
- MOVE: We move the Hero to the Mountain Tunnel and drop a Flag for more territory, stealing Polania’s Metal for more points, move the mech on the Tundra tunnel to engage the Saxony Hero in combat, and end our movement action.
We use Sword, reducing our opponent down to 2 power. We play 2 Power and a 5 combat card, which ensures the combat victory, and our final star, while spending the minimum amount of power.
End Game Stats.
- Stars: Mech, Enlist, Objective, Combat (1), Worker, Power
- Round 18; 81 Coins.
Albion Patriotic Thoughts & Tips.
Getting that first Encounter with the Upgrade and resources was a huge boost in this game. It saved us one round and allowed us to deploy our first mech sooner.
We got our power star due to the first encounter upgrading our Bolster action and upgrades from our neighbors. Without the encounter we would have had to hunt a second combat as we would not have had the power star.
The bots’ positioning was poor. We had to go hunting for combats. If we could have gotten 2 combats, we could have ended in round 16. This is lightning fast for Albion Patriotic and shows how powerful this sequence can be with the right encounter.
This playthrough was against the “hard” Scythe bots. Bots are okay practice here and there, but they’ll never get you ready to win against real players. Bots tend to play it safe and don’t spread out on the board, oftentimes staying in their base and Upgrading. Real players also have the intuition of what you’re trying to do and will oftentimes throw wrenches in your path. All of that is good practice for getting flexible with Scythe.
Albion Patriotic Video.
I’ve got a video Tutorial that walks through this move sequence. If you are wondering how to play this combination without a good encounter, or want to see more strategy discussion, take a look!
Albion Patriotic Epilogue.
That’s about it! If you’re a newer player or would like a refresher on some general parts of Scythe, check out our Quick Tips and Strategy section. Looking to get into Scythe? Check out the tabletop version at Stonemaier Games or the Digital Edition on Steam!
Otherwise, if you’d like more Albion combinations, check out our Albion Strategy overview, and if you enjoy our faction / mat combination posts, find more of them in our Strategy Archives. As always, leave a comment if you have any thoughts or want to share how this strategy worked for you!
Happy gaming!