Clash Royale Guide: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Clash Royale is SuperCell’s latest strategy card game! It is a mix of hearthstone and a clash of clans. It is extremely fun and requires a bit of quick thinking and strategy to defeat your opponent. This guide will help get started in Clash Royale so you can begin dominating your foes!

Game Basics

It’s a tower defense with two towers and a castle for each player. You are both separated by two bridges in the middle. You have access to a deck of 8 different cards. There are different types of cards, such as spells, troops, or buildings. You aim to use these cards to your advantage and destroy the enemy’s tower or castle.

The win condition is simple:

• You must destroy more towers than your opponent.
  
• Whoever destroys the castle tower in the middle first wins.
  
• If, after 2 minutes and the game is in a stalemate, you enter sudden death mode(plus your elixir spawns twice as fast). Whoever destroys a tower or castle in the next minute wins.
  
• After 3 minutes, if both players are still in a stalemate, it is a draw.

You gain pvp points when you defeat an opponent. Playing against higher-ranked opponents will net you more points if you win. You also lose fewer points if you lose.

Cards Available Initially

Now this game has very advanced rock/paper/scissors type mechanics. One card will beat another, but only if you use it at the right time. There are common, rare, and epic cards. Just because a card is epic doesn’t always mean it’s better. They can still be beaten if you play your cards right. Let’s take a look at the starter cards.

Archers – 2 of them are summoned at the cost of 3 elixirs. Useful against air units. Do not use them as a front line, or they will die quickly.

Knight – A medium-sized front-line fighter useful at soaking damage and dealing some decent damage. You can use him to tank groups of small troops or have him go first to tank damage for your ranged attackers. Does okay damage to towers.

Read: How To Play Clash Royale on Your PC

Mini P.E.K.K.A – A stronger attacker that does a lot of damage to towers and single enemies. He will attack anything closest to him. That means he will usually switch targets to the closest enemy or tower. He is vulnerable to small groups of enemies.

Baby Dragon – An air unit that deals small AoE splash damage. Does well against small troops but is vulnerable to Musketeer and Tombstone. Deals decent damage to targets.

Musketeer – Ranged attacker that counters air targets—a great unit to counter the Baby Dragon as long as she isn’t tanking damage. Use someone like the Knight or Giant to be the meat shield.

Giant – Ah, the tower and building attacker. He ignores troops, just like in Clash of Clans, and has high health and can take a beating. The Giant does well against buildings once he gets to them. He is very slow and can be countered easily by massive small troops. You can pair him with the witch or ranged attackers like the musketeer, archers, or spear goblins for good damage.

Arrows – Your first available spell card. Deals huge AoE damage to a select area. Does well against small troops, especially the skeleton army and goblins. However, it does have excellent aiming. It has a 3-second delay, so you can miss your targets easily if you mistime the area. It does poor damage to towers and buildings, but it does have a huge radius to hit both the tower and the castle.

Fireball – A spell card with a stronger version of the arrow but a smaller radius. Does good damage against small and medium troops like the barbarians or witches.

This is your beginner’s deck. I climbed to Arena 3 with this. Along the way, you will get more cards you can mix and match to your liking. Since it depends on luck as to which other new units you get, I will just list some tips to help you get the mechanics down.

General Tips and Tricks

Since you have 3 minutes to battle, you can wait about 5 seconds before your elixir charges to 10. You have two choices here, you can wait until your opponent makes a move first, or you start using your card combos.

If you choose to move first, try these combos:

• Giant + Musketeer – This works well if your opponent uses small troops or knights as their first move. Using this means you are vulnerable to small troops attacks on the other side of the map.
  
• Knight and Archers – A weaker version of the above combo. But it gives you the flexibility to defend yourself with some spare elixir.
  
• Bait and Switch – Put a knight on one side and wait to use Mini P.E.K.K.A. On the other side when they use troops or spells to defend against the knight. Try different card combos for this strategy.
  
• Troop Rush – This works if you can get the Tombstone, Goblin Barrel, Barbarian, or Goblin Hut. Start stacking them up, and eventually, you can overrun your enemy. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, you can destroy the castle easily once you overwhelm them.
  
• Trading Towers – This will require some judgment and experience. It’s either you all in or you don’t. You are welcome to trade towers if you think your troop will deal more damage than theirs.
  
• Cards – You can buy common, rare, and epic cards with gold from the treasure chest area. The cards you can buy are random, and it refreshes every 24 hours.

Tower buildings are harder to get and require you to hit higher arena levels(4 or higher) to unlock. For free-to-play players, it will take a while. I will be updating the guide as I progress further in the game.

Also, remember to join a clan and request common cards to level them up faster.