Rolling down without going broke

Rolling is buying power with gold. Every shop refresh costs gold, and that gold does nothing until it turns into upgrades on your board. Players go wrong in two directions. Roll every round and you never build interest, so you fall behind everyone who saved. Never roll and you get knocked out with a bank full of gold that never got to fight.

The fix is to roll on purpose. Pick the moment: you just reached the level where your target's cost shows up often, your health is starting to matter, or your board is about to lose fights it cannot afford to lose. Then roll for specific upgrades, not for whatever looks shiny. Stop once the board is stable enough to hold, and rebuild your gold from there.

Two things decide how far your gold goes. Your level sets how often each cost appears in a shop slot: at level 8 a 4-cost fills 30% of every slot. The pool sets how many copies are left to find: there are only 10 copies of each 4-cost in the whole game, and every copy another player holds is one you will never see.

That is why you scout before you roll. If another player already holds a 2-star of your carry, only 7 copies are left for you, fewer than the 9 a 3-star takes, and even the 2-star gets much harder to find. Other players holding other 4-costs works the other way, a little: those copies leave the pool too, so a 4-cost slot is slightly more likely to be yours. What to watch is who holds your carry, not how many 4-costs are around.

One outcome is always wrong. Gold still in the bank when you are knocked out bought you nothing. The game review flags going out with 24 gold or more: nine in ten players who finish in the bottom four go out with less. It also flags the other side of the same mistake: a final board with fewer upgrades than the boards that went out in the same round, or a carry still short on stars.