Sierra West

EvEvanstar4,6

In this game players get a small deck of multi-use cards. You lay the cards into the top of your player board as to produce two action paths for your two meeples to follow. Your meeples walk along the paths, taking each action along the way, moving whichever meeple you want, one step at a time. Generally these actions generate resources, or allow you to spend those resources to claim new cards for your deck, or tiles for your board, or bumps on the various produced goods tracks for endgame VP and immediate rewards. The game has a number of different modules you can play with that utilize this action selection engine in a few ways. We started with the recommended first module, which is apples. Apples adds two shared resources across all players, so when you generate apples through your moves, you want to try to consume as many as you can because leftovers will be available for the next player. Really throughout the game there are small but important elements of player interaction. Competing for cards is fascinating because of the way the cards get laid out like a mountain, with only the top cards faceup being claimable, so long as you've walked your marker up there. This means standing below someone is interesting, because they might make the card you are are standing on available through their own purchase. Also, when a player gets a track bump, other players are able to claim a different resource depending on the track. When you pick your cards, players are able to flip over an animal trap that matches an animal on one of the cards you played. I've long been enamored of games with multi-use cards, but this is the first one that really has gotten me excited. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment