Tactics, openings and dirty tricks for every game. Nothing here is essential reading — but it might just win you the next one.
A wild is worth more in your hand than any card you could throw away. Use it to complete a meld, or once you're past your own first meld, lay it straight onto any set or run already on the table. The only time it's genuinely stuck is early in a round, before you've laid anything yourself — the rules won't let you touch the table yet.
"Sort by suit" surfaces runs, "Sort by number" surfaces sets. Flicking between the two mid-turn is often the fastest way to spot a meld you'd otherwise miss in a crowded hand.
Until you lay your own first meld, you can't lay off on anyone else's — so a hand full of half-built melds is dead weight until you commit to something. Getting even a small meld down early buys you the freedom to offload spare cards onto the table for the rest of the round.
Not everyone spots this one: any card in any meld on the table — yours or someone else's — can be picked up and moved mid-turn, wild or real, as long as everything left behind is still a valid meld and the card ends up somewhere else before you end your turn. Swap a wild out of the table for a real card, and it's yours to use again elsewhere in the very same turn.
Taking the entire discard pile can hand you several melds at once, but it shows your hand — literally everyone watches how many cards you take. If Snatch Scoring is switched on, taking more than three costs every other player points too. Great when it wins you the round outright; risky as a fishing expedition.
Going out ends the round immediately, and everyone else scores whatever's left in their hand. Sitting pretty? Don't dawdle. Loaded with high-value cards instead? Watch for the signs someone's about to go out, and think about unloading anything risky before they do.
A big grab doesn't just help you build — it costs your opponents points the moment you take it, live on the scoreboard. Sometimes worth taking a bigger pile than the cards alone justify, purely for the hit it puts on the table.
The AI players are creatures of habit. They will not discard a wild if there is any possible alternative. They'll take a big discard pile the instant it completes them a meld, whatever the size. And they always throw away their single highest-value leftover card. Watch what they don't discard — it's usually a clue to what they're building.
The more players at the table, the more melds end up on it — and every extra meld is another place for someone to lay a card off. A 6-player round tends to end sooner than a 2-player one, purely because there's so much more table to offload onto. Treat high-value cards as more of a liability the bigger the game gets: you may get fewer turns than you'd like to get rid of them.
Everything already on the table has to stay on the table — but not necessarily in the shape it started in. A set of three of a kind can be broken up and redistributed into runs instead, as long as every card lands in a valid meld somewhere by the time you end your turn. Especially worth doing if it frees a wild that was sitting locked inside a set — pull it back out into a run and it's yours to use again.
Hold 50,000+ shares in a company and you become its Director — your single worst negative tip card for that company is thrown out before prices update each round. Cross 100,000 and you're Chairman instead, which discards the worst negative card from any player holding that stock, Director included. With a negative card removed from the total, the price becomes more likely to rise that round — genuinely useful, but the whole table gets a Boardroom News announcement the moment you get there.
From round 5 there's an 8% chance each round of a windfall tax, jumping to 90% once five or more companies have a Chairman on the board. Anyone holding 150,000+ shares in a company priced £5 or above pays 15% of that position's value — cash first, shares sold off if that's not enough. If you're sitting near that line, consider holding just under 150,000 rather than pushing past it. Dominating the board late in a long game paints a target on your own back.
A Rights Issue lets you buy one share for every two you already hold, at just £1 each — so use it deliberately rather than hoping it lands somewhere useful. On your first turn, buy as many shares in a company as you can, leaving yourself enough available shares and enough cash to maximise the rights issue on your second turn. It's worth doing even in a company you have no good tips for, purely for the arithmetic — the higher the current price, the more profit you make on every rights issue share, since you're buying so far under market value.
A government loan hands you £10,000 immediately, but the outstanding balance accrues 10% compound interest at the end of every round. Only take one if you can put the money to good use that same round — left sitting, it quickly turns into a costly liability. Repay it as soon as you're able; doing so doesn't even use up your turn.
Watch how the rest of the table is investing, not just your own cards. If others are buying into a company you have no good tips for, there's a good chance they know something you don't — though bear in mind they might just be setting up a Rights Issue rather than acting on genuine tips, so treat it as a signal rather than a certainty. Generally, heavy buying is a positive sign for where a price is headed, and heavy selling a negative one.
If you're only planning to buy into one company that round, consider holding off until your last turn to do it. Move early and everyone else sees exactly what you're interested in, with plenty of time left to pile in behind you before the price catches up. Wait until it's too late for them to follow, and the advantage stays yours.
If a company's price collapses to around 50p, consider buying big — especially if it's enough to make you Director or Chairman there, letting you strip out a negative card and improve its odds of recovery. Even if it goes all the way to bankrupt, you haven't lost a fortune: price can't fall below zero, so there's a hard floor on the damage, and a Debenture card — yours or the company simply recovering later — can still get your money back out.
A Market Crash and a Windfall Tax can never land in the same round — it's built into the game. If you're braced for one, you're at least safe from the other that round.
AI players pick a hidden personality each turn — value, momentum, or contrarian — but on Medium and Hard difficulty they'll always protect their Director or Chairman status first, selling down just enough to stay above the threshold rather than risk losing it outright. On Hard difficulty they also watch what everyone else is buying: pile into a company as a group and the AI notices, and follows.
If you submit to the public Investor Rating leaderboard afterwards, raw net wealth isn't the whole story — your score is multiplied by how close you got to the theoretical best possible play that game, and every Rights Issue card you're dealt costs you points whether you played it or not, since it's pure luck. Two players finishing with identical wealth can rank very differently.