Tips & Strategy

Algae, Inc. advice: teaching order, a first game, focusing your upgrades, energy, exports and milestones, departments and the solo bot — plus the videos worth watching.

Advice, not rules. Where a video and the rulebook differ, the rulebook wins.

Teaching

• Give each player their department guide before you start and let them read it while you set up the shared boards; their board’s quirks live there, not in your teach.
• Teach in the order of the Teach the Game page: win → boards → a week → end → scoring. Then walk one cube through Machines A, B and C and one export together.
• For a first game leave the capital-city demand tokens out and send the first export to Berlin, as the rulebook suggests.

Host game

Before the first workday, have each player trace the week’s route on the Action board.

Rehearse a weekly route

Before Monday’s first workday, trace a connected path through all five Action strips. Point to the input cubes each planned Machine activation will move, then to the later Operator action that could export the result. A Machine activation needs at least one cube that can move along a Main conveyor belt; a promising action icon alone is not enough.

Show the two escape tokens separately. On a Machine B spot, a Choice Action token lets you activate A or C instead. It cannot turn that Machine action into a Team action; that needs a Wild Action token. Both tokens change the action, not your Supervisor’s permitted path.

Finally rehearse Monday Morning with one Engineer: move one cube along a Main belt without activating Secondary belts. This can avoid a production cost, but also skips any Byproduct the Secondary belts would have supplied. Check the department’s extra Monday step before starting work, especially Food degradation and Biofuel’s optional refining.

First game

• You only get 20 turns. Plan each week as a path up the action board: decide on Monday what you want by Friday and pick the route that delivers it — an unusable spot is a lost day.
• Export in each of weeks 1–3. The team upgrade for exporting that week is strong, and you cannot catch it up later. The Dice Tower review calls these bonuses close to mandatory.
• Keep energy out of the red going into each weekend: a negative energy level means no weekend bonus, and at the end of the month no milestone bonus.
• Don’t spend export/2x tiles freely. Each one left on your side board pays euros and VP every Monday and again at the end.

Building the factory

• The rulebook’s own tip: you won’t upgrade everything. Pick one or two production lines and upgrade those fully.
• Opening a new algae storage gives you choice, but also raises that tank’s capacity for everyone — and invites competition for that species.
• Capacity upgrades and conveyor-belt upgrades multiply each other; the engineer team upgrade flips all capacity tiles at once, even those still in your grid.
• Plan your science grid as one connected group: the science bonus counts only your largest group, and combo tiles can fill the gaps.
• Use Monday engineer moves for the steps that would otherwise cost energy or lose cubes — they skip secondary belts. On Biofuel, move cubes into Machine C on Monday so a refining is ready.

Exports and milestones

• Exporting to a city that already holds any disk is free. Piggyback early and save money for a long, milestone-winning delivery later.
• Milestones pay more for being first. Watch which ones your rivals are close to.
• A multi-city export action needs operators: one city per operator.

Departments

• Biofuel and Cosmetics are energy-hungry; plan where the energy comes from (burning byproduct, science grid and weekend bonuses) before you need it.
• Bioplastics wants cups and bags in pairs; run both lines together.
• Food must sell quickly — degrading food loses value, and spoiled food is gone.
• Some contract combinations make a department noticeably easier (Food’s no-spoilage card, for example); the Dice Tower review flags the balance between departments as uneven.

Solo

• Bruno scores a lot: every neutral disk you leave on a strip becomes a city for him at the weekend. Visit spots with his disks to remove them, especially on the D strip, which holds eight.
• Bruno’s first city counts as the first export, so your transport is measured from it.

Sources

• Algae, Inc. Review - With Graeme — The Dice Tower: overview, the weekly export bonuses, energy-hungry departments, balance.
• Algae Inc. - Preview & How to Play — Let’s Table It: full teach of setup and a week.
• Algae, Inc. - Straight Up Solo with John LaRuffa — No Fluff Solo Gaming with John LaRuffa: a solo round against Bruno, weekend flips.
• Algae, Inc ►►► How does it play? — Rahdo Runs Through: a full playthrough.
• Rulebook: Game Brewer’s English rules V6.