What Strategies Are Most Successful in Games?

Winning at any type of game is a terrific feeling, but how can you achieve it more often in new games? The truth is that there are some fairly simple strategies that work well in most games that you need to know about.

Be Patient

When the action begins, it’s tempting to try and do everything really quickly, to build up your weapons or your money or whatever the game is about. Yet, while you need to be fast and efficient, being patient is often the most important aspect in the first few moments of a game. Make your moves too soon in a strategy game and you’ll probably leave your defenses open or commit all your forces too quickly. If you rush in to attack a rival without being fully prepared, it probably won’t end well.

The importance of patience is also clearly seen in strategy games like Hearthstone, where using up your cards too quickly or adding too many minions to the board is likely to end in defeat. Board games such as chess and Catan are also about choosing the right moment to strike rather than diving in.

Even action games and shooters are generally designed for you to start off slowly. There’s a reason why you usually build up to the boss at the end of each level, as you need to boost your skills and find weapons or tools before you’re ready for a challenge like this.  

If there’s a practice or training mode in the game, this might seem like a waste of time but it’s often the best way to get started. Even just 10 or 15 minutes spent practicing can be invaluable in giving you the basic grounding you need before starting to play for real. In this way, it’ll take you longer to taste some action but you’ll be ready to start competing at a good level when you finally play for real.  

Understand the Rules

A lack of understanding of the rules is one of the biggest reasons why people lose at games. If you think about it, the in-game universe rarely mirrors real life and you need to know exactly how it works so that you can adapt to it.

Perhaps the best example here is when you learn all the moves available in a sports game like FIFA or NBA Live. Imagine you start playing either game without reading about the different moves but your opponent does this. It’s easy to see that they have a huge advantage because they can do things you can’t and react to different situations in more appropriate ways.

This point also applies to casino games, in which case you need to look at how to win and what your chances of doing so are. A look at this list of the best-paying online casinos lets us see which sites give you the highest return to player (RTP). While the games in casinos are essentially games of chance, the RTP lets you have how much on average they pay out, so you can choose the best one for you.    

Multitasking is important too: studies have shown that one of the biggest advantages held by expert players over others is the ability to carry out multiple tasks at once. This is often done using certain combinations of keys to fire out a series of commands in next to no time. Knowing how to do this gives you a big advantage and lets you feel completely in control but calm at the same time.

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Know When to Take Risks and When to Play It Safe

Just about every game requires you to play it safe at times but then take some risks when required. The secret to success is in choosing the right moment to take a risk, which is often when you have enough skills or weapons to overcome your opponents. In some games, you’ll be led up to this point, while in open-world adventures you get to choose when to try something more challenging.

Side missions tend to give you a chance to stay safe while exploring the map and building up your skills. The fun wordplay and insults of flyting encounters in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are a good example of this, as you can keep trying with no risk until you win an encounter and claim your bonus. In other cases, you need to get into the thick of the action quickly, such as in battle royale games. However, you should check if there’s a place where you can find haven until you’re ready to attack.  

These strategies are proven to work well on just about every type of game, and you should use them as your starting point whenever you’re about to try something new and want to boost your chances of success.