woah.
Clearly, my new strategy is on the right track. My goal is to basically create my endgame path, and wind my red path around in semi-helical fashion around it for as far as I can go. I dropped all my earlier strategies (go concave, isolate the center, etc etc) and as you can see with some luck I found myself with a very low score right before the finale (click to enlarge):
You can see how I shepherded the long path around the board and for the most part kept the red path close to it. Here’s the final board (click to enlarge):
I think if I am careful to save a really good tile with a U and a V and some crossovers in my Swap, and try for slightly more torturous endpath winding, I can go even higher. This literally was my first try at this new strategy and of course I really lucked out that I was able to connect the two long path segments at the end. But amazing as this was, it’s humbling to look at how my score fares on the leaderboards:
Whoa, thanks for sharing. Merely at 312 in score, I was really wondering how people actually reach 1000+. This post is illuminating. And yes, I kept using the isolating-center strategy before I read this.