As you will quickly discover, there are many ways to win at The Settlers of Zarahemla, allowing you to play a different strategy each time and still manage to win the game! That's what makes this game so appealing: random setups (which change the board for each playing), a bit of luck with rolling the dice, and different strategies that you can employ depending on your situation.

The following are some things to think about when planning your strategy:

The Wood-Brick Strategy

Follow this strategy by placing your initial Settlements on hexes with high Wood and Brick production. Another thing to consider is getting on a Wood or Brick Trading Post as quickly as possible so that you will have access to other resources that you will need to build Cities, Development Cards and Temple Stones.

Because you will be producing a lot of Wood and Brick, you can quickly build long roads into areas that you would like to build at a later point and virtually "lock-up" those areas from other people. Then you can build your Settlements and receive the Longest Road Card. When you expand your roads, try to expand them around Wheat and Stone hexes so that you can start producing those resources for later on in the game.

The Wheat-Stone Strategy

This strategy is very powerful if you can get the right combination of resources with your initial Settlements. The idea is to produce as much Wheat and Stone as possible in order to upgrade your Settlements into Cities as quickly as possible. When you do this, each time one of your Wheat or Stone hexes produces resources, you will get two resources each instead of just one. This doubling up on production will give you a large advantage in the game and will allow you to do more liberal trading with the other players who may need Wheat and Stone to build Settlements and/or Development Cards.

Wheat and Stone are also the key ingredients for Development Cards so you will also be more likely to purchase large numbers of Cards (which will include Stripling Warrior Cards) to keep the Gadianton Robber off of your hexes. If you turn your Settlements into Cities early on in the game, you will probably be the target of the Gadianton Robber early on so having Stripling Warrior Cards available will be very handy.

The Card-Builder Strategy

This strategy is very similar to the Wheat-Stone strategy in that you want to have good initial Settlement placement on Wheat and Stone producing hexes. You then want to quickly upgrade your two Settlements into Cities and then focus on purchasing as many Development Cards as possible. As there are 5 Victory Point Prophet Cards in the deck, you have a good chance of securing a majority of those cards if you focus on them. Plus you will be given access to several other important cards that will help you get Victory Points.

For example, you will probably end up with the most Stripling Warrior cards giving you 2 points. You might get a couple of Road Building and/or Temple Building cards which will help you get the Longest Road and/or The Greatest Temple Contributor cards. Those are worth 2 points a piece. You can quickly be the "underdog" and secretly win the game with this strategy.

The Rare-Resource Strategy

One strategy that sometimes works is to pick a rare resource on the board, with decent production, and place your two initial Settlements on that resource to try to monopolize that resource or resources. Rare resources may be one resource hex of Wood (for example) that has an 8 on it but the other Wood hexes all have low production numbers. So you could try to monopolize the great Wood hex to control that particular resource.

The Numerical Advantage Strategy

Sometimes the best way to play the game is just to go for the best odds in placing your initial Settlements and not worry as much about the type of resources that you are producing. If you can get a Settlement or City on each number of the board, then you would get at least one resource with every roll. This is sometimes harder with a four-player game and easier with a three-player game as you will have more room to expand your territory. If you can keep gathering resources with each roll, you will have enough to negotiate with other players to get the resources you need to win the game.