Gold Country
Reiner Knizia is a prolific board game designer but part of the reason he can claim to have designed close to 1000 games is that he is known to revisit and rework his designs so that they reappear in a new skin. Case in point, Gold Country, published by Bitewing Games. With art from Beth Sobel, Gold Country has a very different look and theme from Reiner Knizia's 2012 game Spectaculum (R & R Games), but at its heart it's the same game.
Gold Country is played on a board divided into hexes and with a gold mine at each of the board's four corners. Players draw wooden tokens from a bag and keep them secret from other players. The tokens each correspond to one of the four mines. On your turn, you reveal your three tokens and place them out so that they are adjacent to the corresponding coloured mine or any of the corresponding colour tokens that are already spread out from that mine. You also make up to two transactions; buying and/or selling a share in any of the four mines. In addition, there are action cards that can be bought, typically giving you specific mine tokens that can be placed out.
Tho' it has the look of an exploration game, Gold Country is essentially a stocks & shares game but it's one where the tokens are a means of manipulating the share prices. Each of the mines start off with a stock price of 5 coins but tokens that stretch out from the mine vary the value by being placed on tiles that add to it or subtract from it. As in any stock market game, you make money by buying low and selling high.
Gold Country is an unashamedly 'take that' game. Tho' each player holds one hidden share, the bulk of their holdings are open information. If I see that you have a preponderance of Sutters Mill mine shares, I'm probably going to place out tokens if I can that tank your shares before you have a chance to take your profits. There are other spots on the board too that set players at each other's throats: cave-in tiles force players to pay 2 coins for each of the shares they own and bandit tokens can be placed adjacent to any mine to remove a tile from the game.
This is a much improved and streamlined game in comparison with Spectaculum, and it benefits too from a more relevant and coherent theme. The positioning of the bandit tokens at the centre of the board gives the game a distinct arc; changing it up as the bandits become an increasingly significant way of manipulating the board and the share prices. And for added replayability, Bitewing Games have published Gold Country with a double-sided board that extends the game's replayability by introducing additional tiles, including boats for crossing the river that runs through the centre of the board, connecting tunnels, dynamite (giving you extra tokens) and gems (worth 5 coins but not spendable during the game).
