Gold West

EvEvanstar2.5

The game has beautiful components, although there's a minor issue where the scoring trackers don't really fit on the scoring spaces when multiple players share a space. Unfortunately, the essence of the game is about being 'firsties'. I'm reminded of how in many Feld games there's that one element that gives points to the player who accomplishes some task early vs the lesser benefit of someone who built their engine and scored the feature later. This game applies this same idea to nearly every mechanism, but the engine building element seems nearly completely missing from the other half of that equation. The first player to grab a card gets that card's reward and bonus (plus the cards don't refill). The first player to move their car past a marker gets a bonus. The first player to claim a spot gets that spot and those resources. Only the first and second players to claim an endgame scoring criteria gets to score for those things. At the end there are some points in terms of majority scoring, but they are uneven and uninteresting. One possibly interesting choice this game has you make is when you collect resources from the board, you place them in this Malacca box. If you place them in a box where you won't be able to use them right away you get some extra points. I think this is meant to be the engine side of things, but it feels underutilized in this game where 'firsties' is so heavily rewarded. ★ 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

Elvirastar7.0

Also for sale

Ferran A Salesstar7.0

A good rondel game. I didn't feel interested in replaying it soon, but overall it was a nice experience