Tips to go 10-0-0

A 10-0-0 is ten up years, zero void months, zero down years. It happens in roughly half a percent of games. These tips will not make it likely. They will make it possible, which is the most property has ever promised anyone.

1. The year is the game

New players draft streets. Players who've been burned draft years. Your decade replays your area's real price history from a starting point the game chooses, so a portfolio assembled from late-nineties vintages rides the long boom, while anything stuffed with 2006–2007 prices is going over the waterfall in round three of the simulation regardless of how handsome the cards looked. You can't choose your starting year — but you can choose how exposed your six picks are to an expensive vintage.

2. Void months kill more runs than crashes do

Down years arrive from the market and there's a limit to what you can do about them. Void months arrive from your own drafting. Every rental property, every year, rolls against its Demand and Risk scores — so a single low-DEM, low-RSK rental is a slow puncture across the whole decade. Five void-free properties and one leaky one is still a leaky record. If you remember one number on a rental card, make it DEM.

3. Use the re-spin like it costs money

You get one. The discipline is knowing what it's for: it is not for "these three cards are mediocre", it is for "this draw structurally breaks my run" — a peak-price year on your HMO round, a one-street area for your last rental. Spend it on the catastrophe, not the disappointment.

4. The Flip is your crash insurance

The Flip only counts towards your record in years one and two, then it's out. That makes it the one slot where you can take a swing without carrying the risk for a decade — and the one slot that shrugs at whatever happens in year eight. If your other cards are wobbly, a strong Flip is the steadying pick, which is an extremely funny sentence to anyone who has actually flipped a house.

5. Commercial is where dreams go to be protected

Your Commercial slot wants the dullest card you can find: decent yield, high RSK (remember — higher is safer), no drama. Every 10-0-0 run we've seen had a boring anchor. The corner shop does not stir the heart. The corner shop does not empty for eight months either.

6. In Expert mode, the price is the stat

Stats hidden, nerve required. But the card still shows the street, the year and the real price — and that's most of what you need. A terraced house at £48,000 in 1996 in a town you know? That's a high-GRW card wearing a blindfold. Expert mode rewards exactly one thing: actually knowing what your patch was worth, and when. People who lived through their local market have an advantage no spreadsheet gives.

7. Accept that the decade owes you nothing

You can draft flawlessly and lose to 2008. That's not bad game design; that's the entire thesis. The record system measures survival, not brilliance, and the difference between a 9-0-1 and a 10-0-0 is usually one bad winter in someone else's economy. Play again. The next decade is always about to start, which is either the game's message or the market's, and we're no longer sure there's a difference.