Coal Baron: The Great Card Game

EvEvanstar4.6

I was originally attracted to this game by the idea that I might get a similar experience to Coal Baron proper, but without the tile warping component issues, in hopefully a faster play time. Really though, this game is it's own creature. The general idea here is players get cards that have a certain number of printed workers. A card display is laid out by type, and players take turns assigning their worker cards to the various spots, to claim cards. This gets tricky quickly as to take an action, you must lay down 1 or more cards where the sum of workers is exactly 1 greater than the cards used to take the previous action in that spot. What you are doing with most of these actions is taking and then trying to complete recipe cards in the most efficient way possible. The game gives you a few hurdles in this, for example you have to take actions to get carts, then get the coal into the carts, then you need a train at the front of your lines of carts, all the while doing color matching between the carts and the train docks. While you are doing your best to manage this, you are also collecting bonus cards that customize your scoring criteria for the end of the game. This is certainly a mechanism that excites me, but drawing the right cards can be crucial and adds just barely a little more luck than I'd like. ★ 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

TATaha Afyounistar5.2

A very interesting worker placement card-based game. Playing this makes me want to try the Coal Baron board game.

David Arribasstar3.5

Pues empieza bien, se desarrolla bien, pero es una ensalada de puntos y mas pronto que tarde puedes descubrir que adquirir cartas de bonus es la mejor manera de hacer puntos y ganar la partida dejando todo lo demás al servicio de esta estrategia.