Kris Hall: Charcon, Horus, and The Dutch Golden Age

For those Essen-phobic gamers who live in or near Appalachia, Charcon made a fine substitute last weekend.  I could not be in the Charleston Civic Center for the entire two days, but I spent enough time to see that the boardgame aspect of the con was bigger and busier than ever.  This was due to the various boardgame tournaments run by the Appalachian Gamers, and the prizes that were available due to the generosity of Rio Grande Games and CABS.  Congratulations to Travis Reynolds and his team.

But what would a con be without new games?  I got to try two new ones: Horus and The Dutch Golden Age.

Horus (designed by Jean Vanaise) is not a bad game, it’s just not a particularly gripping one.  Horus is a tile-laying game in which players try to form groups of tiles of similar terrain (farms, hills, desert) and then place control tokens onto these tiles in order to score.  I prefer not to dwell on the negative, so I will simply say that I played this game with Ted Cheatham, and neither one of us is likely to try it again. 

The Dutch Golden Age (designed by Giuseppe Bau and Leo Colovini) is a game of a different caliber.  This is a victory-point engine game in which players try to dominate the provinces and guilds of Renaissance Holland in order to gather cards which generate cash or victory points.  As with many victory-point engine games, one of the crucial decisions is always when to stop trying to accumulate cash and when to go after victory points.  It is also important to avoid running out of cash because most of the game’s actions require money, and a player without cash can waste turns as he waits for a payout.

Each player begins his turn by rolling two die, and then moving a pawn around a track at the edge of the board.  Most of the track’s spaces contain the names of two provinces, and whenever the pawn stops on a space, the players who have tokens in the named provinces collect cash.  The names of particular provinces are not distributed evenly around the track but are grouped onto sides of the board.  This allows players to move their tokens around the map of Holland in the hope of placing the tokens in spaces that are more likely to generate a payout soon.

After moving the pawn, the player can move his tokens, take over a guild (by paying cash), or perform an action that is allowed by guild control or token placement.  The provinces of Holland, and the various guilds, are all color-coded to match different decks of cards, and having a token in a province or control of a guild is necessary to draw cards from the appropriate deck.

The cards enable players to collect more cash (there is an element of set collection to the game), gather victory points, or perform other special actions (such as choosing the space the pawn lands on instead of rolling the die). 

I don’t think that the Dutch Golden Age is a very innovative game, but it seems to have a solid design, and colorful and attractive components.  I hope to play it again before long.

Comments:

< Back Home