Business Tour – Online Multiplayer Board Game – Strategy Guide for Best Win %

See what are the best and worst properties to buy and strategies to execute to be the best player!

Strategy Guide for Best Win % – What to Buy and Not to Buy

All credit goes to ilares !

The Basics

So this strategy is best for the 20mn games that almost everyone play now, where 90% of the time you win by taking everyone else money, since the time is usually way too short to buy 3x monopoly, a whole side or the 4 beaches.

There is a TLDR for the lazy peoples at the ned of this guide by the way.

Since you can’t avoid to pay your opponents when you land on their buildings, the only way to maximise your money is to make opponents pay rent from you:

• If you have 0 properties, you’ll never win.
• If you have all properties you win 100% of the time.

And here the first trap happens…

Yes, Buying Everything Is Really Stupid

I discover this game recently and played a lot of games and was surprised that almost all players have the same (stupid) strategy: buy everything and see what happens.

But you can sell your houses for full price when you have to pay rent so I dont risk anything right? RIGHT?

Well you forget a MAJOR thing: you can’t buy good properties without money.

So yeah first there is good and bad properties: the worst is the first, Grenade, you buy 3 houses for 210k and get… 75k rent. So yeah you have to hope 3 people go on it to be BREAK EVEN.

And now let’s look at Tokyo: you buy 3 houses for 1000k and get 600k rent so you need ~1.5 people to go on it to break even, which is almost twice better. Only exception is MAYBE if you are the first player to go, so 3 more will risk to go on your first. But still i wouldn’t buy Madrid on first turn for instance.

I made an excel sheet after playing a few games:

You can see that Grenade give you 36% ROI (return on investment) and Tokyo 60% which is a HUGE difference

You also see that beaches give from 12.5% to 16.7% ROI, so unless one people has 3 beaches and there is quite some time left and you have to block his win condition, never buy the beaches, never, just don’t, it sucks. You’ll spend 200k for one beach and you have to wait 8 times for people to go on it to break even LOL. Oh you have 2 beaches?? now you spend 400k and you have 50k rent nice! OH IT’S STILL ♥ 8 TIMES. 3 times worse than Grenade ROFL. Even with the festival thing on it, it’s still not worth it (25% ROI). YEAH it’s a beginner trap. Yes you played 250 games buying it everytime. Yes it was a bad idea. Welcome to the real world of maths, not luck.

So yeah you need to save your money for the BEST properties, from Venise to Tokyo. Please note that properties who only have 2 to have a monopoly, so hambourg berlin for example, has way more value than the 3 one because you need only one other property to DOUBLE your rent and ROI! And it’s even more impactful as 2-3 players than 4 because the lesser players the more chances you have to have a monopoly (2 or 3 of the same). Also ROI will eb even more with the world championship and the monopoly.

Monopoly + world championship on Tokyo is x3. You spent 1M (million, 1000k) to have a 1.8M rent. Now on Grenade you spend 210k to have a… 215k rent. See the difference??

Also for the obvious, we never know:

• Always buy if there is the orange festival flag on it, since rent is x2, even Grenade is now at 72% ROI, better than 60% Tokyo. Except beaches. BEACHES SUCK.
• Always buy AT LEAST 1 house, ideally the more houses the better. Having few properties with hotels is WAY BETTER than lot of properties with one house. The only exception to buy the terrain is obviously if it give you the win, but also to get the monopoly. Even blocking your opponent from a monopoly is not really worth it because it’s still cheap, you want at least one house so he pays a lot. And remember he still has to go there, so if you have only a few minutes left, it will probably not happen

So next time you are on the plane and can go wherever you want

• Priority #1: Monopoly
• Priority #2: Festival, ideally the farthest from start, so festival on Tokyo is worth way more than Grenade
• Priority #3: Avoid high rent enemy buildings, so as a reminder you go 6-7-8 nearly half the time so anticipate your next move!

A few details worth noting:

• Milan has more value because double 1 from the island get you there
• Lyon to Tokyo has a bit less value than theory since people can avoid this part by landing on the plane just before
• Never rebuy anything from your opponent, unless it gets you a monopoly, for a festival it depends where it is on the map, rebuying Grenade for twice the price, is still the same ROI of 36%, so not interesting

When to Leave the Island

So always stay on the island at the last few minutes of the game, because moving your player only make you pay high rent to opponents and always leave ASAP on the first round because you can’t win without buying properties.

In between, it’s hard to say, i would say pay 200k to leave when:

• There is not a lot of high rent enemy building (so you’ll probably get 300k or a bit less for a whole turn)
• Milan, double 1 is free so you will buy it or skip instead of paying rent to opponent
• You have la lot of money, like 1M+ so you can buy interesting properties with 2-3 houses

Conclusion

TLDR

• Don’t Buy beaches and Don’t Buy the first side of the board from Grenade to Shanghai
• Save your money to buy properties at the end of the board, ideally from London to Tokyo

Yeah I know it’s hard to not buy the low price properties, but how many games have you lost landing on Grenade to Shanghai?? and how many landing on Lyon to Paris?

• Focus on having 2-3 properties from London to Tokyo with 2-3 houses or a hotel, that’s more than enough to win!

Remember this game has a LOT OF LUCK involved, so even with the best strategy, on a 4 player game you will win 30-35% of the time instead of 25%, so don’t start every game like it’s already won, and just have fun!

Oh and try to spend not more than 5-10% of your chips on games if you don’t want to spend your whole salary on useless virtual things