Strategy Hints
Even after playing over 500 play-testing rounds of Kiitos, I can’t say that I have groked all the possible strategies. You can probably come up with some unique strategies of your own.
Here’s a few strategy hints to get you started for Kiitos:
Tend not to rely on letters that are in your hand being also in your opponent’s hand. i.e. don’t anagram your own letters. The chances that your opponent has a particular letter goes down if one of them is in your hand too.
Anticipate what a word could be turned into if your opponent can’t play the next letter. Can you then play a letter after that?
Try not to give away what is in your hand too often. Call a word with the same next letter that you are trying to draw out of your opponent’s hands. But don’t make the mistake of having the subsequent letter in your hand. e.g. Playing a B and you are trying to make the word BUTTER, have got a T in your hand and haven’t got a C in your hand, then call BUCKED or BUCKWHEAT.
Don’t do the above and actually call what is in your hand. i.e. mix it up such that your opponent can never be sure what letter may or may not be in your hand.
Keep on hand an S for pluralising, Es for ER, ED and EST, and Is for ING and IEST
Draw the Ss ,Es, and Is from your opponent’s hand.
Learn the letter distribution to work out which letters there is only one of in the deck, e.g. W, K, Y, X, Z, V and J
Try to play the letters that there is only one of in the deck earlier in the game, as if it is the last word of the round your opponent may have noticed that it is yet to come out yet, isn’t in his or her hand, and therefore must be in yours.
If you have no vowels call letters that tend to have a vowel following.
Try to notice when your opponent has no vowels and conversely don’t let on that you have no vowels.
If you suspect your opponent has no vowels, make it harder for them by playing letters that tend to only be followed by a vowel. e.g.V, H, J.
Some word fragments are harder to follow. e.g. there is only one word (and its plural) that can follow on from JNA. Following on from CON is not hard, following on from DJI is much harder.
Call words with the same letter that you don’t have again and again. e.g. If all the words you’ve called have a Z in them, but you don’t have a Z, then your opponent may assume you have a Z and try to draw it out of your hand.
Some Super-Kiitos strategy hints:
Make harder letter combinations to continue, with letters going over the break in the syllables in a compound word being good for this, e.g. TFL of flatfish or WDR of screwdriver.
Start with a letter that appears multiple times in the word. e.g. an A in causation can be followed by a C, U, S or T.
Keep letters for common prefixes, such as the N for UN- and the E for DE- and RE-
When you have more than one letter that you can follow with, try to guess which is the one your opponent anticipated and play the other one.
Flipping strategy hints:
Flip the Positive x2 card towards the end of a round rather than at the beginning, so it has less chance of being flipped back, and also because you know you have a bigger positive pile than your opponent.
Flipping back to Kiitos can lower the chances that a word can be completed. This can be advantageous if you are trying to protect the value of the positive pile multiplier card towards the end of a round.
Challenging strategy hints:
Don’t challenge suspect words if you can follow with the next letter, although this can be risky.
Try to bluff non-words by using confidence so it doesn’t get challenged.
Try to bluff non-words by saying “American spelling” if you’re not an American and “British spelling” if you are American, or by giving a false, but believable meaning.
If you are even a little bit unsure of a long word that you would otherwise have to pick up, challenge.
Sometimes take a risk on a word that you may think exists. It just might. Kiitos is a wonderful game for edge-case testing the dictionary.
