Winning by not playing (Much)

I played two games in PSG yesterday that, although very different, I won in pretty much the same way: By passing all the time. It's a bizarre tactic that feels very counter intuitive. I want to play more. More importantly however, it feels that in a well balanced game, this should be a losing strategy.

Factory Manager - In this game you pay money to build machines that make you more money. But it only lasts 5 rounds. I noticed that people were paying so much for their machines that the money they would make off them was minimal. So I decided to pass. In the last 2 rounds I built nothing. In the 3rd round I built a single machine. I never upgraded or sold anything. And I won, quite handily, by simply hoarding my money. In this particular case, I was disappointed that this strategy succeeded. If I'm only playing for half the game and blindly passing for the second half of the game, this game overstays it's welcome.

I don't think I'm looking forward to playing this again.

Homesteaders - Immediately after playing the above we played another economic optimization game. And again I started passing. In the 10 round that we played I passed a whopping SIX times. I won on the tie breaker.

One thing that did help: of the four buildings I did buy, two were high victory point buildings (Including the church), and another was making me copper bars that I was exchanging for victory points anyway. The last one was giving me trade tokens in order to keep my options open when I needed them to be.

However, unlike Factory Manager, I wasn't bored. I was passing only after being outbid by my opponents, and not due to a conscious decision to stop buying anything. I very much wanted to stay in the game, but my opponents kept taking loans to overbid me on things. I was still an active participant. It hurt to watch my little town stay so small, but in this game, it had to be done.

This is so far, the hit of the (early) year for me.