It must be difficult to come up with totally new ideas for games when you’re as prolific as Dr Reiner Knizia, with over 800 titles to his name according to BoardGameGeek and more than 70 awards. (There can’t be many boardgamers who don’t have a Knizia title on their shelves!) It’s not overly surprising, then, that some of his earlier games are being reincarnated in different guises: 2012’s tile-placing, stock-trading game Spectaculum is the latest to get such treatment, returning in the form of Gold Country in Bitewing Games’ just-launched Kickstarter campaign. Given that Gold Country is a Knizia game, it’s also not surprising that the campaign reached its target—in fact, it was significantly overfunded—on its first day.
While a simple reprint of Spectaculum would satisfy many folk, Bitewing Games and Kinizia have tweaked and updated the gameplay, as well as retheming it with attractive artwork by Beth Sobel. I imagine few people are familiar with Spectaculum so I won’t spend any time describing that game or the changes, but anyone who’s interested can check the publisher’s notes at the end of the rulebook, a link to which can be found on the campaign page.
The Game
Gold Country is a quick (30–60 minutes) 2–4 player game in which ‘Gold flows like an endless sea in the rich hills and forests of California, and countless would-be prospectors have flocked to the lush landscape to stake their claim and make their fortune. Gather your pickaxe and pan, scout the land, and invest in the richest mines to collect the most gold!’ (from the rulebook). The land here is a large hex map with 4 base camps at the edges, representing the mining companies you can invest in, and scouting means building out across the map from those base camps, encountering tokens affecting stock prices positively and negatively as you place tent-shaped claim tokens. The map is 2-sided, with the ‘advanced’ side containing a river and tunnels.
Some of the claim tokens represent bandits (stretching the gold prospecting metaphor a little, these are the same tent shape—they have to be, since they’re gradually added to the token draw bag, so have to feel the same as the others), which have to be separated out at the start of the game and placed on the map’s 7 forest spaces, with gold vein tiles placed on top. The remaining tiles (gold, fool’s gold, cave-in and nuggets—plus dynamite, gems and boats in the advanced game) are placed face-up randomly on the indicated hexes. A starting tile of value 5 is added to each base camp, representing the initial stock value of the corresponding mining company. Each player takes 3 claim tokens at random from the draw bag, keeping them secret from other players using a little screen, gold coins to the sum of 20 and a secret mining company card (the one that player will score on, no matter what else happens during the game) as well as 4 normal mine cards, one for each company. Game setup includes a hardware store with a randomly drawn claim token on top, and action cards, which I’ll cover later.
On each turn, players can perform up to 3 actions, in any order. Revealing and placing their 3 claim tokens is mandatory, and they must be played adjacent to tokens of the same type or beside the corresponding base camp. Before placing their pieces, a player can swap one of them for that on the hardware store. If a (non-bandit) token is placed on a space containing a tile, the tile is removed and the corresponding action taken:
gold vein—the tile (with value +3 or +5) is placed on the base camp associated with the placed token, and the bandits below it are added to the draw bag;
gold (+1, +2, +3) and fool’s gold (-1, -2, -3)—these tiles are similarly added to the base camp;
nuggets—each player receives 2 coins for every mining card they have in the related company (apart from the secret one); and
cave-in—each player loses 2 gold for every corresponding (non-secret) mining card.
The tiles added to base camps act as increments or decrements to the stock price of that mining company, thus players are directly affecting how much their shares (i.e., mining cards) are worth, down to a minimum of zero.
A bandit token can be played adjacent to any base camp or claim token and if there was a tile on that space, that tile is simply discarded (but if it was a gold vein tile, the bandits beneath it are still added to the draw bag).
The second action possibility is to perform up to 2 mine card transactions—each selling a single card you have (apart from the secret one) or buying a new one at the current stock price. Note that both transactions must be done together—you can’t, for example, buy stock at a low value, then place claim tokens to increase the price, and sell the stock back.
The final optional action is to pay 3 gold to activate an action card. These are 9 single-shot actions letting you, e.g., swap all your claim tokens for a new draw from the bag, gain an additional claim token of a specific company, or perform a third mine card transaction.
Finally, players draw 3 new claim tokens, and the next player has their turn. (I wonder why tokens are drawn here—if players did this at the start of the turn, there would be no need for the screen; perhaps it’s to give people something to think about while the other players are taking their turns.)
The game ends at the completion of the turn when all 7 gold vein tiles have been removed from the board, or immediately if the bag is empty when someone needs to draw a token. Players sell all their mine cards, including the secret ones, at the current value, and the highest amount of gold determines the winner.
In the advanced flavour of the game, the map is split by a river with a single bridge; however, boats can also be used to cross it, while tunnels provide another means of getting from one side to the other. Boats are single use, and players start with a single one, but more can be gained during the game. Tunnels require the use of 2 claim tokens for the same company, one being placed on the tunnel entrance (preventing that space from being used in the future) and one alongside the exit. The additional tiles used in this variant of the game are:
boat tiles—gain another river-crossing boat;
dynamite—draw 2 additional claim tokens; and
gems—counts as 5 gold when scoring, but unlike coins, can’t be spent.
Verdict
This is an attractive game, and pleasingly quick to play. Each player’s turn is snappy, limiting down time (and I guess you can be thinking about where to place your claim tokens on your next turn, anyway). Apart from the secret mine card, everything is public knowledge, so there’s no need to juggle a huge amount of information as you play.
Like most Knizia games, moves look simple, but hide significant amounts of (take-that) tactics and strategy—it’s probably a game which grows in complexity as the same group of players return to it again and again.
Campaign extras include the usual deluxification—‘deluxe coins’ (note that it doesn’t say they’re metal—they might be, or might not… ‘Warning: these metal coins may or may not be fools gold, but they are hefty and clackety like the finest metal coins’ is hardly conclusive), deluxe tiles and draw bag, as well as ‘metal prospecting pans’—you what?! Metal trays to store your deluxe coins in—woo.
More interesting is the Bona Fide Bonanza Expansion. According to its rulebook (linked from the campaign page), this includes 4 different additional scoring objectives, such as Bidwell’s Bar (white) reaching the opposite side of the board, or Sutter’s Mill (red) having at least 3 claim tokens on the gold vein spaces (remember there are only 7 of those). Each objective comes in 3 scoring values, such that the first person to grab one (using one of their mine card transactions) will gain more than later players, but note that having unfulfilled objectives costs points too.
One other campaign add-on is a completely separate Bitewing game, Totally Human, a lightweight filler game sort of thing, which I’ll leave it to you to find out about for yourself.
Finally, is this a campaign worth backing. Well, maybe. Gold Country is a good-looking game, in the sense of both gameplay and appearance, but it will absolutely be coming to retail, though jumping on the Kickstarter will (probably) get it to you more quickly. (Crowdfunding campaigns never come with a guarantee, but Bitewing Games has done this enough times that the risk is on the low side—and this is a Knizia game after all.) The expansion looks neat, but is it worth the not insignificant upgrade cost? Personally, I’ll wait for retail.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
