Post originally by Frank J. Perricone at 2005-04-15 13:38:27
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You might want to check the timestamps. The questions you refer to are all dated after the message to which you are responding, so your insinuation that I was avoiding the questions are based in ignorance.

The number of combinations makes it hard to spell out more than a general idea of strategies in a small space, and given the way this discussion is going, I don't see much point in trying to persuade people who've already made up their minds. Which is fine: if it's not strategic for them, it's not. I'd amend my review if I could to add a caveat to that effect. But I will give some broad strokes of some of the things I found myself doing, or having done to me.

Perhaps the single largest is to try to remember, predict, or guess what the other players are holding, by various means (remembering previous patterns, analyzing what they look like they're trying to do, using action cards that reveal things, remembering which cards have already been played, etc.). Then using that information to counter them, or to get them to direct their strikes against other players than yourself. And naturally trying to mislead them about your own cards and intentions. Naturally the high turnover of cards makes this more challenging, which means if you find yourself better able to be guessed than to guess, there's an advantage in playing cards that cause a high turnover, and if you think you have a better idea what your opponents are holding or planning than they do about yours, it's better to play rules that cause less turnover.

Admittedly, if everyone else in the game is playing basically randomly, or are only thinking through the current turn and not beyond, none of that will work.

Others have mentioned some of the strategies that work within a single turn. Some of them dovetail into the very obvious strategy of saving up cards for more effective combinations, like not playing a high Draw card until you also have a low Draw card to counteract it, so you get more cards but your opponents don't. And of course cards like Play All and Hand Limit can counter that tacti, though it's harder to use those in combination to zap your opponents but not yourself, so the counter has a natural limit -- it's best used when your own hand is small, or you're already prepared to make it small because of other things you're doing.

I suspect most people are playing Fluxx like Uno, where no one talks to one another. Whereas they're probably playing Munchkin like they play Illuminati, with lots of negotiations and backstabbing. Did someone tell them it had to be that way?

Frankly, I'm wondering what deep strategic possibilities everyone else is seeing in the card games in the same market as Fluxx. There's certainly a lot of randomness in Fluxx, but there's also a lot of randomness in those games. Just not so much that you can't come up with a sensible decision of what to do right now if you think about it. Nor so much that you can figure out all the combinations in the first five plays. Fluxx isn't chess, but it's not tic-tac-toe or craps either. It is, as I play it, as strategic as Munchkin, with 1/100th the learning time. That's good enough.

I don't intend to respond to the flood of refutations I'm about to get where people say why they were unable to use these strategies and therefore they don't exist, because really, I'm not here to persuade anyone and no one's here to be persuaded. So have fun with it.