When to Sabotage

A mysterious marauder takes a map at the edge of a blade in the card art for Blade Edge Bargain by Slobodan Jovanovic. Click the image to uncover the ACTIONX GALLERY.

After five minutes of playing on auto-pilot, you look down and realize your opponent has established two Sites and a Relic in their Action Zone. Uh-oh. You start reading the cards and it immediately becomes clear that these three game pieces work together to give your opponent a long-term strategic advantage. Enter Sabotage. Sabotage is a Heroic Feat that allows you to destroy active Relics and Sites in your opponent’s Action Zone. As we touched on in “Thwarted Again”, it is important that you understand your opponent’s game plan before going for a Sabotage. Depending on the context of the game, some Relics and Sites may do very little to help your opponent win, and you do not want to waste resources on removing a useless game piece. On the other hand, by their nature, Relics and Sites stay active indefinitely, so they have the potential to generate massive advantage if they go unchallenged. Consider the relative importance of a Merchant’s Scale on Noble when your opponent has no Adventures completed versus when they are in the Final Adventure. If they have no Adventure completed, that one Relic threatens to draw them four additional Leads. If they are in the Final Adventure, however, it does nothing. This analysis becomes more interesting when your opponent has just one or two Adventures completed. The key question to ask yourself is: “What advantage is this card going to generate if I do not Sabotage it, and can I beat that?” The Sabotage is a critical action to understand because it is one of the only ways to interact with your opponent’s Relics and Sites. It may feel unintuitive at first, since it requires you to sacrifice some of your own resources. With a little bit of practice though, you will be keenly Sabotaging your opponent’s plans, leaving them befuddled, and, hopefully, defeated.