Whatever it takes to win

One of the tenets of Playing to Win is that not only do you do whatever is necessary to win, it can actually be advantageous to sometimes take bad strategies because your enemies won't see them coming. I had an opportunity to exercise this yesterday in Chaos in the Old World. Khorne generally wins by letting his advancement dial get run up, killing anything standing near him. He doesn't usually care about the score track except to consider who's ready to explode there. Well, I had that ridiculous opportunity to actually win by points, and I did so in a rather awesome way.
Starting off the game, the Empire was obviously the preferred region for all parties. Thanks to a meteor shower, it had a noble and warp stone while naturally being populous. Considering it's also worth the most points for domination, I decided to just make my first play with the greater demon right there. Normally, this is a reasonable play because Tzeentch has a tendency to teleport your first cultist/warrior away to Norsca, but this time I just knew where I wanted my best man. Initially, because I had no realistic way of getting out to kill anybody for the first round, I just went for the hilarious move of putting another warrior in there and making my attack dice count for domination. That gave me 7 domination value, and because you may recall there was a noble there, the region was worth 6 points! With 6 attack dice staring them in the face, both opponents just let me take the Empire. (Other starting card was the 0-cost ghost dice, for what it's worth).
Next round, what do you know? I get the same domination value card! I play it on the Empire again, though of course I make it one of my last plays so I can be terrifying. I managed to get a dial advancement to earn an additional 4 points. In the following round, I draw the same card again! I just found this to be too rich, and proceeded to dominate the Empire for a third time (though the noble got moved by Slaanesh). For those of you keeping score, that means I got 6+6+4+5 for 21 points... in 3 rounds.

Again, let me state that Khorne generally wins by destroying other figures. Everyone runs in fear of Khorne. As a result, regions Khorne may choose to dominate get somewhat avoided, whereas if Nurgle were to try dominating a region, he'd probably have some company from other players. Nobody expects Khorne to win this way, so the Empire was quite a fruitful venture. Furthermore, I had been playing some cultists whenever I had an extra point, as well as when I knew a region was just going to be ruined regardless of any action I took (players can easily run in fear of the greater demon once he's moved). I already knew that I could reasonably work for points, so I figured I may as well get on the action of regions ready to ruin, especially if I could get 2nd place unopposed. I also ended up ruining the Empire in 1st place, so you can imagine once 3 regions had been ruined, I'd been working rather healthily.
Right about then, I realized that there weren't enough rounds available for me to win by dial. I hadn't been killing all that much. I was forced to try for points and made no shame about declaring it. People still run in fear of Khorne because he's still so good at killing their figures. Norse Reavers (an event that essentially makes a super Hero in 3 regions) had been pretty much forcing me out of Brettonia & Estalia, while Tilea was fairly unattractive to anybody. Troll Country and Norsca had nothing going for them throughout the game. A decent fight was going in the Border Princes. Tzeentch had been establishing good control over the Badlands, and Nurgle was about to destroy Brettonia. Initially, I tried to keep Nurgle from getting lots of points from Brettonia's ruination by preventing corruption, but that got cancelled by Tzeentch.
Somewhere within that round, I noticed something. There was nothing I could really do with Brettonia, but Tzeentch was the only one getting any corruption in the Badlands. Brettonia was sure to go, as was the Badlands. 3 regions had been ruined already. Although Nurgle had Provender of Ruin to get extra points from regions getting ruined, all the math I saw said that I would still be ahead of points if I contributed to ruining the Badlands. If Brettonia went according to Nurgle's plan (and I made no attempt to reveal that he was doing exactly what I wanted him to do), I could work on destroying the Badlands for the 5th ruined region and thereby end the game. I would then have the most points for the win. I didn't notice the extra little bits of domination I would have, so by the time the game ended, not only did Khorne win by points (I had exactly 50), but there were 5 ruined regions, 2 of which instigated by Khorne, who had more points than anyone else.


It just goes to show, you can't discount the highly unlikely possibilities of winning. Sometimes, the most awkward strategy is actually the one that will work.