The six slots explained

Your portfolio has six slots, drafted in a fixed order. Each is a different job with a different way of going wrong, which is to say each is a different kind of British property anxiety. Here's what you're actually picking for.

Slot 1 — Forever Home

The place you live. It pays no rent and suffers no void months — its job is simply to not ruin you. Draft for Condition (you have to wake up in it) and Liquidity (one day you'll need to leave, and "we've had it on for fourteen months" is a sentence that ages people). Growth is nice here but it's a paper victory; you live in your equity, you can't spend it.

The classic Forever Home error is romance: drafting the lovely street with the terrible numbers because you can picture the kitchen. The game will let you. The decade will comment.

Slots 2 and 3 — The buy-to-lets

Two of them, because one buy-to-let is a hobby and two is a portfolio. These are your income engines: draft for Yield and Demand. Demand is the quiet one that matters — in the simulation it directly lowers your odds of void months, and void months are what stand between you and a 10-0-0. A spectacular yield in an area where nobody actually rents is a spreadsheet daydream.

A cheap vintage helps enormously here. The same street drawn in 1998 instead of 2014 can double the yield score, because the rent estimate is divided by what you actually paid.

Slot 4 — The HMO

A house in multiple occupation: more tenants, more rent, more everything else. The HMO is the highest-income slot and the most fragile one — it carries a built-in Risk penalty because four tenancies means four chances per year for something to go wrong, and the simulation respects this. Draft for Yield, obviously, but glance at Risk before you commit. A high-yield, low-risk HMO is the single best card in the game. You will almost never see one.

Slot 5 — The Flip

Buy it broken, sell it proud. The Flip is the only slot where Condition being terrible is the opportunity — its rating actually rewards Growth and upside rather than comfort. It contributes to your record only in the first two years of the decade (after that it's sold, in theory), so it's also the only slot where a rough year nine doesn't touch you.

The trap: a Flip drawn at a market peak. You're buying the renovation and the timing, and the timing is the part you can't paint over.

Slot 6 — The Commercial

The corner shop with the striped awning. Commercial property is the grown-up table: longer leases, steadier income, and absolutely no glamour. Draft for Yield and Risk — here, boring is not a compromise, boring is the entire strategy. A safe commercial lot is the anchor that lets the rest of your reckless little squad express themselves.

Drafting the set, not the six

The mistake everyone makes for their first ten games: drafting six individually decent cards instead of a portfolio. Your record is collective. One void-prone HMO can wreck a perfect run by itself; one safe commercial can't win you anything alone. Before each pick, ask not "is this a good property?" but "what does my decade need?" — which, now we write it down, is probably advice for more than the game.