YMMV / Underwater Cities

• Accidental Aesop/Green Aesop: The game makes a stand on the concept of escaping Earth for Mars, rather than sorting out the problems at hand. It also provides players with extra points for making their cities better integrated with the underwater ecosystem via the construction of symbiotic cities.
• Better Off Sold: Certain permanent effect cards, especially from the first era, have near-useless effects (like a bonus for placing two upgraded labs in the same city), meaning they are best used either just to play any given field (regardless of colour) or outright sold for the draw of 2 fresh cards and 2 credits. Especially when you have cards offering a bonus for mismatching colour, making it more valuable to miss the bonus of the card itself than whatever it was providing.
• Cheese Strategy: Pairing and upgrading kelp farms. That's 3 points per production round. With the right cards, it's also extra kelp, points and credits. It's perfectly possible to just directly produce victory points by spamming those, and there is a high chance to have a Special card that either does Score Multiplier for left-over kelp or pairs of upgraded farms (and sometimes, you get both). Even without any extra hassles, upgrading kelp farms is the easiest source of loads of extra points. Short from some specific tiles on the advance side of player boards, nothing comes close to the amount of points generated by pairs of upgraded farms.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • The first era has some of the most powerful permanent effect cards, that pretty much decide the rest of the game, either by having them or by the fact you were denied access to them. This era also has the cheapest and most flexible "pay credit to play another field" cards, allowing for the multiplication of actions.
  • The second era has two just as much loathed cards: increase the size of your hand to 4 cards and transform any of your white domes into a red one for pocket change.
  • The "turn 15 credits into 13 points" Special card. It's the most straightforward and easiest to achieve end-game Score Multiplier, making it both highly sought after and loathed by just everyone, as it's pretty much "free" extra 13 points in the end with zero hassle.

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