Blue Prince Cheats and Tips
First Ranks First
The Blue Prince map is separated into nine different ranks; you begin at rank one with the entrance hall and work your way up to rank nine, where you'll find the antechamber. Whenever you open a door, you'll generally be presented with three different options for the room you can create in the adjoining room.
You may feel the impulse to head straight for the north end of the manor and dart straight for the Antechamber. This is a trap for a few reasons:
Relying on the game to provide you with only rooms that allow you to progress in the exact direction you need is a fool's errand.
The Antechamber at the top of the manor is locked, and you'll need to solve puzzles in other rooms to unlock it.
It's a good idea to try to get as many rooms built as possible instead, and this will involve filling out the early ranks with as many rooms as you can based on your luck. The main reason for this is that the rooms you have available to you form a limited stack - once you've built a room once on a particular day, it generally cannot be offered to you again.
This means that the more rooms you use to fill the low-rank gaps, the better chance you have of encountering rarer or newer rooms, which will provide you with new puzzles, new clues, and new opportunities. Without doing this, your days are more likely to end by you running out of things to do rather than running out of steps, and thus, you miss out on potential progress.
Dead Ends Are Worthwhile
Related to the above tip, it's worth singling out the importance of using dead ends where they make sense - for example, in locations where you won't be missing out on many paths forward. There are multiple reasons for this:
Using a dead end removes it from the day's deck of rooms to draft, meaning you're more likely to have better options on subsequent drafts.
Most dead ends are actually useful. Even the red-bordered Bathroom can sometimes have useful items inside.
Dead ends still have the potential to help you progress in puzzles - don't feel put off by a dead end simply because it's a dead end. Every single room is worth drafting at least once.
A good practice is to save dead ends for the sides of the manor at early ranks - as long as you have alternative ways to progress northwards in the manor, of course.
New Rooms Are Important
As hinted at in the previous tip, a new room is always worth drafting when it pops up as an option. Even the most innocuous-sounding rooms can have vital notes or clues inside that can help you solve a puzzle or even alert you to the very existence of one.
The same is true of red-bordered rooms that have nasty side effects. Some, like the Gymnasium, are standard punishments, but others have troves of information inside that can help you learn crucial information that can help you on future days.
Gems Are A Good Early Focus
A good portion of the rooms that you can draft require Gems to choose. In many cases, you'll be forced to create dead ends or miss out on a new room or discovery thanks to the perfect choice being locked behind a Gem cost.
This makes it a good practice to focus on picking rooms that provide Gems early on in a day to enable those more expensive but powerful rooms. The Parlor is usually a very strong choice, as solving the puzzle inside will give you two Gems.