Designed by Dr Hans Joachim Hoh, Michael Loth and Christof Schilling, and with art by Felix Wermke, My Gold Mine is a light push-your-luck card game published as part of Kosmos' accessible 'open & play' range of small box games. The 2-6 players are competing over three rounds to steal the most gold from a dragon and escape with it to the exit before the dragon incinerates them.
The game is played along a row of nine cards with the exit on the far left and the dragon on the far right. The players all start off in the middle. There's a face-down Exit deck that, as you might expect, mostly gives you movement towards the exit, and there's an Exploration deck. On your turn, you draw a card from either of the two decks and follow the action indicated.
In an unusual twist, the Exploration draw deck is face up so you know what card you'll draw if you choose that option: it'll be to take a gold and stay where you are, take two gold and move a step towards the dragon or take two gold and move a step towards the exit. When you take an Exploration card, however, you immediately reveal the card below. If that's a dragon card, the dragon will move to the left. And if there's another dragon card immediately beneath that one, it'll do the same again...
If the dragon overtakes you, you're eliminated from the round and you lose all the gold you've collected over the round. You're out of the round too if you get to the exit, but you get to keep the gold you've collected and score for it. For the first two rounds, you score 3 nuggets for having the most gold, 2 for the second most and 1 for the third most, tho' in our plays at Board's Eye View we opted to only score for third place if there were four or more players; and for us the game is best at higher player counts. For the third (final) round, you score all the gold you collect on Exploration cards plus any nuggets from earlier rounds. That means everyone still has a chance of winning even if they were eliminated and scored nothing in previous rounds.
The movement effects of the Exploration cards could be made more obvious but that's a minor (or should that be miner?) quibble in a fast, fun, family-friendly push-your-luck game. There's scope for some 'take that' tactics: you want to stay in the mine as long as possible but ideally you want to have other players between you and the dragon so that when it moves it troubles them rather than you. And some of the Exit cards have the option of moving other players' tokens, so if you reckon you're ahead on gold cards collected you might move others to the exit sooner than they'd choose to go...