The stair gambit

When talking about Castles of Mad King Ludwig recently I opined that the Utility Card that gives bonus points for Stairs wasn't so great.  It has substantial potential if you can effectively corner the market on Stairs, but otherwise it isn't exciting.  A game of Castles recently saw me go turbo Stairs to test this theory, and it worked out superbly well giving me a 136 point finish with a wide margin of victory, largely on the back of getting 5 Stairs.

We had Kings Favours for both square footage and number of corridor rooms so the game was ripe for a hardcore Stairs opening.  I started off with the Utility cards that benefit Utility rooms and 200 rooms, and after building 4 sets of stairs I scooped up the Stairs Utility Card!  I would have built more Hallways than I did but one opponent went nuts and scooped up 3 Hallways in a single turn leaving my last Stairs looking lonely and sad.

My board doesn't look that super at first glance but my Utility cards are strong coming in at 10, 8, 6, 6, and 3 points.  I also have 14 points from Stairs and Hallways, and the 200 stack emptied so the fact that I was collecting those was fantastic for me too.  The last two King's Favours were doorways (where I scored 1) and purple rooms (where I scored 0).  However, I cleaned up the two Favours for Corridors and Corridor square footage so I got a solid 17 points from Favours.

One thing that I was wondering was how good Basement rooms are in general.  Clearly if you already have Stairs you might as well build Basement rooms if they look tasty, but are they really worth it?  Do you give up much by simply not having any Stairs at all?  The interconnectedness of the points of various rooms makes this calculation quite challenging, but I am going to have a stab at it on this board.  It won't be easy to generalize it to all games, obviously, so take this as a data point, not a thesis.

I will assign points from cards to the Utility Rooms that generate the cards, not the rooms.  The points from my starting cards will be assigned to the rooms.  I will ignore the 350 Corridor I bought because it was obviously purchased only for King's Favours and isn't representative.

Utility Rooms:  12, 9, 5
Green Room:  5 + 10 coins
Blue Room:  4 + (empty 200 stack = 8 - 3.33 = 4.66)  = 8.66
Yellow Rooms:  4, 4 + (2?) bonus turn(s)
Basement Rooms:  11, 7, 6, 5, 1 + 5 points + bonus turn

My upper rooms generated 6 points + 1.25 coins + .25 bonus turns.
My basement rooms generated 7 points + .2 bonus turns.

The difference between the two set is quite small.  The basement rooms come out on top if you count the kitchen as not completing, but if you treat it as though it completed they are very much on par.

Looking at this board it appears as though my basement and upstairs were similar in scoring on a per room basis.  In that case it appears as though Stairs were a fine investment even aside from the massive stack of bonus points they got me as I did well on basement rooms and having the flexibility to buy them was excellent.  I am not yet convinced that being the third person into Stairs is strong in a game unless the Favours or Utility cards benefit Stairs, but I am eager to see what data other people have in this regard.