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Designer: Leo Colovini
Publisher: Phalanx/Mayfair Games
Year Published: 2005
Price: $30.00
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Number of Players: 2 3 4
Age Range: 10-up Family Teen
Game Type: Area control Strategy

"Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” Plenty of Americans heeded the call to travel west in the 19th century, whether they were looking for gold in California, religious freedom in Utah, or hundreds of acres of sunflowers in Kansas. Leo Colovini draws on this history for Go West! and puts players in the role of businessmen trying to make a living off these travelers as they head for the shore.

Admittedly, the nature of your business activities in Go West is completely abstracted. The U.S. is divided into six regions, with New England reaching down to North Carolina, the Great Plains located east of the Midwest, and the entire West Coast labeled “California.” (Phalanx is a Dutch company, and Americans would likely mangle the Netherlands geography just as badly as the U.S. gets it in this game, so we can give them a break.)

The four central regions of the country have a circular track above each of them, with a black partition marker in one of the eight circles in each region. The remaining seven circles represent business opportunities for the players. Twenty wood wagons are placed in New England and aimed towards the western shore.

Each player starts with a bunch of counters, a double-move token, six scoring cards, and a hand of seven cards. In general, the cards each depict one of the four central regions, a number of wagons, and a cost from 1-6. On a turn, a player either plays an action card, plays a scoring card, or sells an action card. The actions in more detail:

• Play an action card: You discard an action card, pay the cost in counters (moving those counters into a central bank), place one or more counters on the region or regions depicted, and move wagons the depicted number of spaces from east to west. (A picture of two wagons, for example, means move one wagon two spaces or two wagons one space each.) When you place counters in a region, you place them clockwise away from the black partition marker and other counters already in the region. If all seven spaces are filled, then you bump the partition marker clockwise the necessary number of spaces and return the bumped counters to their owners.

• Play a scoring card: The cost of the scoring cards starts at 1 and rises to 16 for the final one. You pay counters to the bank equal to the cost of the scoring card, then score each of the four regions. Whoever has a plurality of counters in a region scores one point for each counter as long as an equal number of wagons is in that region. Then the player with the secondmost counters scores points as long as wagons remain, and so on. (Wagons aren’t removed from the region; they simply limit the number of points awarded in a region.)

• Sell an action card: You can discard a card from your hand and return counters equal to the cost of the card from the bank to your counter supply.

Each player has a double-move token, and you can place it in the bank at the start of any turn to take two turns in a row. Once everyone has used his or her token, they’re returned to their owners for further use. When someone passes 50 points or all the wagons leave New England and the East, then the game ends and the player with the most points wins.

Go West! can be frustrating with four, or even three, players because your standing in each of the region’s business tracks can be destroyed before you take another turn. Some actions cards, for example, let you place one counter in the depicted region and one counter in any other region; this lets you affect majority standings in multiple ways, which makes the player standings in each region extremely fluid. The double-move token is one way to thwart this fluidity, but if one player never uses this token, then everyone else goes without it for the rest of the game. The solution, naturally, is to play with only two players, which gives each player more control over the flow of the game.

Playing with two also makes the scoring actions more meaningful. Each region scores whenever you play a scoring card, and keeping one opponent down is much easier than quashing three of them. The opponent is still likely to gain a few points when you play a scoring card, but you’ll generally come out ahead if you’re playing smart.

And talk of “playing smart” brings us to the final point. Colovini’s games are generally opaque—that is, how each individual action affects the later game isn’t clear at the time you take the action—and Go West! is more opaque than normal. In your first game, you typically won’t understand how to set up scoring turns, and you’ll constantly be running low on counters, forced to sell cards at bad times and turn down opportunities that your opponent presents.

With more experience, though, you’ll learn how to play the game better. If you play with three players, you’ll see an advantage to always coming in second and letting others pay for the scoring. Go West! isn’t a rah-rah game full of laughs and fun, but it does make for a tricky head-scratcher.

If you get your fill of hardtack while on the road, try playing Go West! instead, which is available at online retailers such as Thought Hammer, Funagain, Boulder Games, and Cardhaus Games.

December 15, 2006 | (2) Comments | Permalink