Designed by: Michael Schacht
In The Golden City players play the role of merchants, arriving by sea and establishing trade routes on a mythical island – starting at the coast and heading inland, to the city itself!
The board shows the island; divided into four geographic regions and with the titular city at the centre. Dotted over the landscape are towns which are connected by roads – starting at the coast, you build trade houses in these towns and then, one connection at a time, make their way inland building trade houses as they go. Your aim is to collect the most Letters of Recommendation (hereafter referred to as points).
On a given round play moves through four phases – first, a scoring card is flipped over to show what will be rewarded on this round – there will always be an area of the map that will score points if you’ve built houses there, plus a resource that will score points if you have a trading card with that resource on it.
Second, a number of pairs of Landscape cards (one pair per player) are laid out. These determine where you can build, and players choose the set they want. If two or more players want the same set, then this phase will involve bidding.
Third, players build their trade houses. Building on the coast simply requires one Coastal landscape card (players all start with one, plus another random card) but building anywhere else will require two cards of that same landscape type – there is grasslands, forests, desert and mountains. Players can build up to two trading houses and two of any landscape type can be used to represent one of another. Building tradehouses gets you an instant reward, and these are clearly shown on the map. The rewards are: a landscape card (always helpful in a game where they are not bountiful!), gold (for bidding), keys (that allow you to build in the lucrative city centre), bonus cards (for victory points at the end of the game) or trading cards (for victory points at the end of certain individual rounds).
Fourth, the round is scored according to the current scoring card. The round ends and the scoring card is discarded; a new one is flipped for the next round.
The Golden City is a game with simple rules. At the end of a first play (if not before) you’ll see how they all fit together. The best rewards are for building in the city itself, but it is possible to win the game without this by shrewd use of trading and bonus cards.
Not much. There is no combat, so the nearest The Golden City comes to causing offence is the bidding on cards, or possibly beating someone to a lucrative spot on the board.
After an explorative first play, low. Though there may be times where somebody needs to judge their best move either on the board or, more likely, which cards to pick up.
It's not a heavy game. You can only ever have a maximum of five landscape cards in your hand, so you won't be drowning in choices. We've gone for a complexity rating of 3 because a first play might include a fair amount of uncertainty, but once you know the game that will drop to a 2.
Easy rules, fast play, and randomness courtesy of the cards - The Golden City definitely is worth a return vacation.
3-4
Players
8+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
There's something very more-ish about the Golden City; perhaps because it's so easy to teach and play and yet can be really hard to call a winner. It's friendly and intuitive game - we have pretty much all the rules above - and whilst perhaps not a boardgame classic, it does what it does very nicely.