Citadels - Thieves and Assassins beware

 

Citadels, what a brilliant little card game.  This game is a perfect mix of easy to teach hard to master.  With 8 different roles to choose from the options are often wide open and knowing how to play the cards you’re dealt can be tricky.

So here’s my unpopular opinion and the reasoning behind it: Never pick the Assassin or Thief if you can avoid it.  Let me explain the logic.

These are the only two roles that don’t directly impact yourself for good without a little luck.  With the Assassin you’re only hurting another player but you never know for sure which so it doesn’t really help your gameplay, it only hurts a random player IF that, you can quite easily miss entirely meaning you’ve passed on an opportunity for a role that could benefit your strategy for zero gain.

In regards to the Thief you MAY get lucky and score some coins if you randomly guess one of the players who has money at the start of their turn.  If they are smart though there’s never much to grab, that’s if you can guess the role they will take of course.

With these two reasons in mind these roles rank 7th and 8th on my list of most valuable roles in the base game.  They don’t allow for direct actions benefiting your strategy and rely completely on luck to have any effect.  In a game where nearly all luck is mitigated by allowing you to choose from at minimum two roles I strongly recommend you use that mitigation to avoid choosing either of these roles.

If you disagree I’d love to hear from you.  That’s the reason of these posts after all, to start a discussion about the best strategies in the games we love.  Nobody likes creaming a noob, we all enjoy smashing a very adept player.

Happy Stabbing!