It’s about time we posted some guides on Captain’s Gambit. Mitchell and I will share tips from our own angles to help you learn and improve, and between us, you’ll become a CG Master in no time. Check out Mitchell’s post for actionable, concrete, direct advice for newer players. This post instead is an abstract overview of how to improve once you have the basics. It’s helpful if you’ve played at least one game.
Attack whoever has the most health until you see your chance to win.
- Old Proverb
Topics Covered
The Truth About Risk
What Avoidance Looks Like
The Scatter: Why you lose control When You Avoid Failure
The Gambit: How to Build Success Over Time
Make Your Gambit
The Truth About Risk
It can be hard to win a game of Captain’s Gambit. Sure, you can get through a few rounds just by attacking whoever has the most health. But eventually you need to pivot to your objective, and that transition can be rough. You could draw suspicion at any step, ending your whole career before you even get close to victory.
Our natural instinct in stressful situations, especially high-stakes ones, is to ensure we have guaranteed success before moving forward. To guarantee success, we avoid actions that could mess us up, situations that could ruin everything.
In other words, when we’re uncertain, we take fewer chances. We minimize risk.
While minimizing risk sounds logical, in games like Captain’s Gambit, it’s actually a problem. If you’re too focused on trying not to die, you might indeed survive for a time - but you also don’t get closer to actually winning. And that means you’ll simply lose another way.
In the back of all our minds, loss aversion slinks around with bright yellow marks. It reminds us that we may encounter a negative outcome, and reminds us that losing is sad and embarassing. Until you learn to identify it, loss aversion will always hold you back from even the most promising gambits.
But you can break free. Once you understand gambits and how they work, once you recognize the truth about risk, you’ll suddenly find yourself racking up small wins that snowball you into some amazing odds for victory. By consistently taking smart gambits, you will consistently come out ahead of those who wait behind.
Sometimes you’ll fall flat on your face and just die, it’s true. But when you make gambits that others don’t, you can pull out from even the most impossible scenarios with amazing comebacks. You’ll see tons of options every turn, each one more exciting than the last.
That’s how gambits work. Your best opportunities always come with the chance of failure. If you push those opportunities away, all that remains are mediocre paths that will bring you close but rarely all the way to reaching your goals.
It took me a while to learn how to accept failure and take those gambits myself. If you want to master Captain’s Gambit, it’s time for you to learn too.
What Avoidance Looks Like
I remember one of my first games as Prospero. In order to win, not only did I need to gather 8 energy without suspicion, but I also had to Reveal myself and survive an entire round of people trying to kill me. Even in the early days of CG’s development, this was was not an easy task.
I remember trying to control my expression when I found myself at 6 energy with an overcharge in hand. I glanced at my opponents’ energy, counting how many people could realistically attack me. While other players tried to sway me into attacking each other, I quietly calculated the odds of facing more than 2 barrages; the odds of Iago letting me pass; the odds that players wouldn’t co-ordinate a timely Bribe.
After a moment, I concluded there was indeed a good chance I could win - if I was right about who had a barrage and who did not. However, there was also a chance I’d be outplayed. I had to call at least one bluff to win, and if I was wrong, it would be fatal. I would die awkwardly, immediately, taking 7 damage to the face before making even two turns across the table. With that in mind, I spent my energy to Fortify instead. I waited for a safer opportunity.
Two rounds later, Portia killed Iago out of nowhere and took the win.
If I had Revealed, I’m not sure if I would have won - I forgot to ask my opponent what permits they had. But once the adrenaline left, I recognized my mistake, and I bet you did too. My goal should have always been taking the best odds of winning, not minimizing how bad I’d feel if I was wrong. I was influenced by the thought of losing, and my goal shifted to avoid that loss instead of staying focused on the odds of success.
Logically, I saw the lesson. Take risks and be brave, right? That was fine and all, but that sentiment alone wouldn’t fix how it looked and how it felt to mess up. My past-self preferred to easily and consistently score near-wins, instead of risking total screwups to reach for actual-wins.
Luckily, I already loved to play with frameworks at this time, and in a broader sense I grew curious if my own hesitancy in Captain’s Gambit was a warning about similar behaviour in my professional life. Either way, I figured my fear of loss might be something that could be managed with a combination of perspective and practice. I eagerly explored various media to see how others dealt with uncertainty.
I found some answers in two surprising places: from the Hearthstone player Trump and the Slay the Spire player Jorbs, who both provide their viewers with similar lessons. Between the two of them, I learned concepts like playing to your outs, how “risky” short-term plays are actually safe long-term plays, and how you always need to remind yourself of your real goal, especially when tempted by fear.
I distilled a few months of their offhand comments into two main points: when you have unhealthy loss aversion, you 1) lose control of your position and 2) misjudge your best choices.
The Scatter:
Why You Lose Control When You Avoid Failure
When I think of “scatter” to describe agency loss, I picture my family at a picnic, and I picture a single hornet buzzing over.
Whenever you set a goal - no matter what it is - your brain calculates the best path to reach it based on your personal priorities. If a hornet flies beside you, your brain tells you where to run (away). Your brain quickly calculates how to get some distance, and sends your body anywhere that equals “far”. That’s good for threatening situations - I see no problem in Hornetland.
But in Captain’s Gambit, your goal is not to avoid pain. It’s to finish your objective.
That’s an important distinction which impacts on your decision-making on both a large and small scale. We know our brains provide us with options based on the goals we set. So if your goal unknowingly shifts, you’ll find yourself picking from the wrong pool of goals that might not even get you closer to victory. You’ll lose control of your progress.
Example: Hamlet’s Dilemma
Let’s say you’re Hamlet with a barrage and fortify in your hand. Both you and your target have 4 health, 3 energy and 2 blood.
If your focus slips and you only worry about your health, your options may look like:
1A- Network to stall for time, maybe see how many Shields are in the deck
1B- Fortify to survive a bit longer
1C- Barrage somebody else to remove suspicionIf you manage to keep focus on your goal, your options may look like:
2A- Network to stall for time, maybe see how many Shields are in the deck
2B- Barrage your target and call their bluff if they Shield
2C- Bluff an Overcharge so you can later throw two Barrages at your target in a row - in case they Shield the first one
Don’t focus on avoiding loss. Your direction won’t be specific enough, and once the threat is gone, you will have made no progress towards your overall goal. Worse, avoidant behaviour is easy to predict, and master manipulators will leverage you to create advantages for themselves if your focus wavers from your objective.
By the way: did you catch the major flaw with options 1B and 1C? If you only have 3 energy, and you spend it trying to fortify or attack somebody else, then you can’t attack your actual target for at least two turns while you get energy back. (At least 2C lets you have energy for bluffing Shield).
It may sound risky to go for the kill when multiple scenarios could make you lose, but if you focus on your goal, it may look even riskier to let your 4-health target (and other players) do whatever they want for two rounds straight.
Realistically, tons of factors influence the decision you actually make - player count, energy count, captain claims, personalities, etc. There is nothing wrong with choosing options to help you survive. But if you want to win, focus on actually winning and not just surviving.
At this point I’ve mostly been talking about the negative repercussions when you avoid loss. It’s about time to flip this script and tell you the benefits of accepting loss instead.
Embracing Failure: The Gambit
In Captain’s Gambit, both captains and gambits inform your victory. The captain part is obvious, because your captain card tells you how to win, but gambits are more complicated.
In essence, what I call a “gambit” is any time you make a decision where:
A big gap stands between your ideal and undesirable outcomes.
Odds fall in your favour, but you’re not 100% certain which outcome will happen.
A gambit is a calculated risk. If you want more wins, make more gambits.
This is why: if you only play within the realm of predictability and guaranteed value, your options each turn are extremely limited. And when you’re playing a game with 3-7 other people with their own goals, I guarantee they’ll suppress any obvious ways you could gain an advantage over them.
When you decide to “play it safe”, you limit yourself into picking from a handful of mediocre options. Gambits provide opportunities to escape that and fight for your own value.
You see, the uncertainty of a gambit - its own chance of failing - is actually its advantage. If there was no risk of failure in any given decision, then it would be an obvious play, and your opponents would either have planned for it, or they would have taken the play themselves and canceled out your advantage. But when there is risk involved, it’s harder to expect and plan for, and you break the mold that would otherwise hold you back.
Yeah, sometimes acting on imperfect information means you get smacked down instantly. But over time, you’ll grind out incremental advantages one surprise at a time, a few energy or health or blood at a time, or even one alliance at a time. You’ll start to accumulate serious value the more you do this.
You will look “lucky” to other players, when in fact you’ve been preparing multiple opportunities the whole time.
Make your Gambit
If you’re curious what some gambits might actually look like, here are some examples.
Bluffing a permit
Calling a bluff
Convincing the table that you’re Iago, calculating that the real Iago will think you’re Lady Macbeth and accept the impersonation
Making enemies with somebody by convincing the table to attack them
Declaring that you’re Hamlet to try and form an alliance with Imogen
Telling your assassination target that you’ll Bortify them if they Bribe 2 energy to you
Revealing as Prospero, even if there’s a big chance you’ll lose - deciding that these are the best odds you’ll ever have
You’ll find that the path often includes succeeding in many smaller gambits: successfuly bluffing an Overcharge, successfully making people believe you just want to collect blood, strategically trying to orient the table’s attention against a specific captain…
As you play more, you’ll find that recognizing opportunities is actually the easy part. It’ll come naturally, especially when you get to watch the funny gambits that seasoned players make.
The real challenge is mustering enough courage to take your chances. Few people can say to themselves, “I am okay with losing and looking silly if I miscalculated, or if I had bad luck.”
But once you can say that, you’ll find yourself playing a new game.
You will find more success over time once you become comfortable with making gambits. To do this, reframe your goal: find and make choices that optimize your chance to win. This means stepping into the realm of uncertainty and recognizing that ironically enough, you have a better long-term win rate than if you played safe the whole time.
Even if you lose a few gambits, your victories will pile up. You’ll take victories that almost look random or lucky to everyone else. But you’ll know your secret: you simply took the best odds of the situation, with or without fear, and pushed the odds in your favour.
This concludes my first piece of advice about Captain’s Gambit - I look forward to seeing you next time!