Prospecting for Gold in the Old West…

Ah, *G*Old West, I get it now!

In Gold West, players compete as prospectors building their mining empires while vying over the precious metals of the frontier. In a delicate balance of resource management and area control, players must plan their building strategies while carefully managing their supply tracks to refine the right resources at the most opportune times. Stay a step ahead of the competition and you could lead the West into the Golden Age.

Gold West is a game of scoring points by playing 3 different games each round in a way.

You have a player board with some starting materials depending on your start position. Your start position is based on a token with a picture of what your player board should contain.

Mini-game one, the first thing you do on your turn is “Activate Supply Track”. This is a mancala-style game where you pick up everything from one space and drop them off one at a time over a number of spaces…

On the left of your player board are the boxes you place your resources. You pick them up and drop them off one at a time and any you have left after dropping one off on ‘0’ are yours to use this round.

What you use them for are steps 2 and 3.

Using Metals

Step 2 is “Use Metals” where you use the Gold, Silver and Copper you mined to do things… There are 3 things you can do and you can only do each once per round.

First up is deliver…

Each one you spend moves you one space on that track. Leap over a token to take it and score that many points.

Next is to get some end-game scoring…

Pay the cost of the space to put your token on it. These differ from game to game and once you cover it you have it for end-game scoring.

Trading In

The third thing is to trade in for a card.

These take up a lot of your resources but score a lot of points. You also get a bonus point tile if you get them quicker than other players.

Building

The third step is “Building”… To do this you use any Wood or Stone you have collected.

When you build you take one of the tokens from the board and add those resources to your player board. You also add the token into its relevant row of terrain types.

To build a building you just use one Wood or Stone, if you use both you put a disk under the building and you skip a step when you place that token on the player board.

If you can’t build you have to put a building in the Wanted section of the board which may give you negative points at the end of the game.

Eventually, everyone will run out of buildings and the game will end. You score points for having connected buildings, end game scoring stuff, being furthermost ahead on the terrain tracks etc

Most points win.

Gold West Summary

It’s a very nice and quick game. You only have 10 buildings in a 4-player game and you use one per round (You either build one or move on to the wanted section) then you have one more tun. Turns are quick once you know what you’re doing and we found we started our turn before the last player had finished too.

I think we generally played quite politely and in future games, we’ll be more aggressive and build where opponents are building to try and cut their ‘Largest Area’ bonus… Like Terra Mystica in a way.

So yeah, Gold West is a very nice and simple game that plays very quickly but requires plenty of strategic planning to win. You have to build to get the resources you need to use in the next round so you can build and use your metal correctly…

Lots to do but it’s a good exercise in planning.

Jesta ThaRogue