Blessing strategies

One player with full blessings can easily outmatch even an experienced opponent with no blessings. Just having some blessings can help, but optimizing them to your playstyle is also important.

Check out the Sheet for details and calculations, and Blessings for basics.

## Blessing Maximums

Each piece type can have a maximum of 40% improvement to speed and haste, and has a maximum vision of 7 squares. Don't get four general Haste blessings and three Knight Haste blessings; the last one is a wasted slot.

## Generalist vs specialist

If you play with just one piece type, the general blessings are less efficient than the specialized ones. Your king also benefits from general ones though, so depending on how defensive you plan to play, general blessings may be better. If you like a mix of two different piece types (plus the king), general blessings are clearly better (though of course rarer; weigh the cost of rerolls against settling until after you've maxed blessings).

## Haste or speed

Both haste and speed increase your overall actions per minute (APM), and so should be considered one of the top priority blessings. You can dodge more attacks and respond in lightning time; see the Bait and Switch Tactic. With even a slight edge over an opponent's APM, you can chase them down and win the exchange. With a significant edge, you can even capture a guarded piece and escape before the guard captures your piece.

*Which one* of the two to focus on probably depends on your playstyle. Long-range pieces benefit more from speed than short-range ones. Haste improves your bombing (and other placement) agility.

## Vision

King vision may be worthwhile in order to stop keeping a rook around just for sight. This is probably not a very necessary blessing overall, but if you're hunting for specific players, or don't check your minimap frequently enough, vision can be useful.

Vision + Speed is deadly: if your opponents can't see you, a swift move could end them.

## Quench & Solid Ground

If you want to camp one of the corresponding biomes, the blessing might be worth it. You never *need* these if you're vigilant about the timers, but it does give you some breathing room.

Furthermore, it can throw off opponents' expectations of your movements. They might expect you to leave the quicksand or go to the oasis and commit to a move based on that prediction; you can capitalize on that mistaken prediction.

## Blessing Seeker

When you're rerolling too much to find what you want, this can be worth taking. Dump it when you've maxed your blessing card.

## Big Box

Mostly useful as an alternative to Blessing Seeker (get more items to trade away to rerolls), or when the map is packed with terrain and you don't find many boxes with what you need.

## Frugality

This might be worthwhile early on, but long-term you shouldn't really need this: checkmate opponents and get their pieces instead.

Then again, if you trade or blunder pieces a lot, especially if you use rare pieces like queens, then you might want this for longer.

## Queen Song

If you want to focus on queens, and camping queen-spawn tiles isn't enough, you'll want this blessing. After you have "enough" queens and a maxed blessing card, consider dropping it. Together with Frugality you can get a sizable queen army quickly.