A Few Acres of Snow: Reserve

A Few Acres of Snow has a very interesting mechanic that is part increased hand size, part permanent trash pile. That mechanic is the reserve and making proper use of it seems to be very important when it comes to being successful at playing the game. It's such a unique feature and so important that I want to spend an entire post talking about it.

The mechanics of the reserve are fairly straightforward. As an action you can set one of the cards in your hand off to the side in the reserve zone. It doesn't take up space in your hand, deck, or discard pile as a result. It just sits set off to the side. Then during your turn you can retrieve all the cards in your reserve for no action by paying one buck per card retrieved. You have to get them all back if you get any of them. The cards are still vulnerable to attack so if your opponent ambushes you he can get any military cards in your reserve. A priest/indian leader can steal a neutral Native Americans card put there as well. (Note: There is a maximum of 5 cards allowed in the reserve.)

What can you do with the reserve? The first thing that jumped to mind when I started playing was trying to set up a perfect combo hand. With the French I would reserve away cards that had furs on them. Then when I drew my trader I'd trade for a ton of bucks. Of course this wasn't actually terribly efficient (you earn 2 bucks per fur but had to pay 1 per card you retrieved and you lost an action for every card reserved along the way) but with a clunky deck it did ok. I've since stopped building clunky decks and the rules have changed preventing it from working anyway...

The next thing you could do is use the reserve as a sort of trash bin. Why bother buying a governor and spending actions killing cards when you could just stick your worst cards in the reserve and never bring them back again? It turned out this was the basis for the truly degenerate British deck that was unstoppable. Two actions to stick Pemaquid and St Mary's in the reserve and then you have a sweet money engine with your remaining 5 cards. They ended up publishing new rules for the game in order to shut this strategy down. As an extra rule with the reserve you can no longer put location cards in the reserve. Only empire cards can do there now.

This restriction shuts down the truly broken part of the reserve but what remains is still very powerful. If you want to get rid of locations you now need a governor but what are you supposed to do with the governor after you've eaten the bad cards? Stick it in the reserve! You can even use the reserve for other purposes as well and just pull back the governor with the other cards. Maybe you can find a use for it again. Maybe you need to spend another action to reserve it again. It all works out!

What else can you do with the reserve? A prime use is to store all your military cards between invasions. In order to assault a fortified capital you need to set up a very precise hand. Louisbourg, a boat, and at least 5 strength of military power. Trying to cycle into this hand one or two discards at a time isn't going to work out very well for you. Reserving the military power (and maybe the boat!) makes it so you just need to draw Louisbourg to win which is an easier combo.

I've also used it to store my priest card as the French. After you've taken all their Native American cards you can use the priest to extend your raid range. But if you just want to keep ambushing you have no use for a priest. You don't want to governor it away in case they buy more Natives later... So stick it in the reserve! With reasonable hand tracking you'll even have a good shot at nailing the Native should they buy one. And if you do shift into a raid game you'll have a priest waiting for you!

A final thing I've done is stored a settler card until I'm going to win a fight. Then I can pull it out of my reserve the turn before I win in order to settle Pemaquid. Alternatively if you're trying to cube out with a biggish deck it can help to reserve the settler and dig until you get the right city card. Not very money efficient but sometimes you have enough money and just need to end the game before Quebec gets conquered.