Is there a good cheat sheet or standard tactics FAQ somewhere?

By Nakama, in Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game

I've just been messing around with the demo decks and was trying to figure out if there was a good default for certain things.

Like how many cards should you bid on average?

How much fate should you have available to do events and attachments during your turn?

What level of honor is critically low?

Just curious if anyone had worked to summarize these types of questions somewhere yet. :)

--Jed "Akodo Nakama" Carleton

There's some hints in the Learn to Play document, but one of the things about this game is that everything depends upon the current situation. And unlike other games, the world is constantly changing.

Gonna be annoying and just say "It Depends". Much of the game depends on current board state.

How many cards? Depends what your honor is, what your opponents honor is, and what you are trying to do. If you are trying to either gain or cause your opponent to lose honor, bid low. If you need cards and can afford the honor loss, bid high.

How much fate? Depends what is in your hand, and how expensive your deck is, and what fate gains you might have during the conflict step (From rings for example, maybe a ring has 1 or 2 fate on it and you are first player, so your first conflict might target that).

Critically low honor is enough that you could lose. Being at 1 is bad. Can't say when to start being worried about it, except maybe to say, as long as you are close to starting honor, you are okay. I would guess that between 4-7, depending on your opponent.

1) If you're just getting started, try bidding 3 a few times. Decks that care less about their honor can consistently bid a bit higher but decks that really need to be higher honor than the opponent (just Lion really) will likely bid 1-2 throughout most of the game. It gets interesting when two decks that don't care about honor both start bidding high and then one bids low to put honor pressure on the opponent, or when a deck that's threatening honor win realizes they're not going to make it and draws 5 cards for a big push against the opposing stronghold.

2) I'm aggressive with Dynasty cards so I often have 0-2 Fate left over for the conflict phase. That's probably fine for demo games but you'll notice your needs more as you get used to the game. Pay attention to what Rings have extra Fate on them too as initiating a conflict with one of those Rings can mean paying for cards despite spending big in the Dynasty phase.

3) Being at 5 honor and under is low while having 20+ honor means your opponent can't be reckless about giving you more.