Tips & Strategy

How to teach War Chest, what to watch in a first game, and how the bag shapes your plan.

How to teach it

• Read Teach the Game aloud, then play the first-game armies from Setup.
• Teach the three kinds of action with coins in hand: on the board, face down, face up.
• Play the first round with open hands, then hide them.

Your first game

• Recruit early. Two coins per unit run out fast, and every coin lost to an attack is gone for good. A round spent recruiting pays off for the rest of the game.
• Watch the discard piles. Face-up coins tell you which units your opponent can’t use until their next refill, and when that refill comes.
• Bolster what is exposed. A one-coin unit next to an enemy dies to a single attack; one extra coin makes the trade even.
• Count the locations. You need 4 more (5 per team with four players). Taking an enemy location counts twice: you gain one and they lose one.
• Use the initiative. Going first next round lets you strike or control before your opponent can answer. It costs a coin, and it can change hands only once per round.

Building your bag

• More coins of a unit mean you draw it more often, but a big bag cycles slowly.
• The Royal Coin always comes back: it is your guaranteed face-down action.
• Deploying a unit takes its coin out of the cycle onto the board; bolstering does the same. Units on the board need coins in the bag to act.

Two against two

• Talk out loud about your plans, but remember the other team hears it all.
• Teammates share locations, so one player can deploy where the other took ground.

Videos versus the rulebook

The rulebook and AEG’s FAQ answers win over any video. The FAQ collects the designers’ rulings; recent ones replace older answers, for example on abilities that trigger after an attack.

Sources

YouTube: War Chest - How To Play, by Watch It Played; How to Play War Chest, by Geek & Sundry. BGG: the designers’ answers are linked by thread in the FAQ; AEG’s War Chest page has the rulebooks.