Players: 2-4
Time: 45-75 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)
The Components
Go West! comes with:
- 1 gameboard
- 80 playing cards
- 20 wagons
- 120 tokens
- 4 scoring pawns
- 4 double-move pawns
- 4 partition pawns
- 1 rulebook
Gameboard: A small, four-panel linen-textured board. It depicts a United States divided into six territories: California, West, Midwest, Great Plains, East, and New England, with 8 space "region tracks" above each of the middle four regions. There's also a 55-point score track around the edge.
I don't usually kibitz about map accuracy in games, since I understand that real locations often need to be moved around to make distances work in a game, but the map in Go West! is embarassing. Even if we accepted that New England went down to Virginia and that the East include Florida, Alabama, and part of Illinois, I still have to grit my teeth at the fact that the Great Plains and Midwest regions are pretty much opposite of where they should be. On this map, the Midwest, which traditionally is the area in the US around the Great Lakes, includes New Mexico, while the Great Plains, lying directly east of that, includes Missouri, Wisconsin, and part of Illinois. Some fact-checking here would have been nice; as it is I shake my head whenever I see the board.
Playing Cards: 80 full-sized, medium-weight linen-textured cards. 24 of them are scoring cards: each player gets six in his color, and each one shows the cost of doing each scoring round (from 1 to 16). The other 56 are action cards. Each of these shows: where tokens may be placed; how many wagons may be moved; and the cost of taking these actions (from 1 to 6). The cards are overall intuitive and make the game easier to play. The colors of two of the regions (the west and the midwest) as shown on the cards are too close together, and I made mistakes with them in my first game; in my second game I still couldn't tell those colors apart, but I just looked at the region geography rather than colors when putting down my pieces.
Wooden Bits: The game has a number of wooden bits, which are all good-quality wood. The wagons are unpainted coaches. Each player also gets 30 disc-shaped tokens, 1 large scoring pawn, and 1 cylindrical double-move pawn in his color (a very traditional red, blue, yellow, or green). The partition pawns are also cylinders, but they come in black.
Rulebook: An 8-page full color rulebook with plenty of examples and good illustrations. Overall, it's easy to learn from and also good for reference.
On the whole, board inaccuracies aside, the components in Go West! are all good quality, well constructed, and easy to use. On a whole I give it a high "4" out of "5": very good.
The Gameplay
The object of Go West! is to bilk western settlers out of their hard earned money as they travel west to fulfill our Manifest Destiny.
Setup: The board is laid out and a partition pawn is placed in the top-left corner of each 8-space region track. Each player selects a color and gets a scoring pawn (placed on "10" on the scoring track), a double-move pawn, and 30 tokens. He also takes the six scoring cards in his color.
The 20 wagons are all placed in New England. They'll slowly move westward.
Each player is also given an initial hand of 7 action cards.
Order of Play: Each turn a player has one of three options:
- Play an Action Card; or
- Play a Scoring Card; or
- Sell a Card
Play an Action Card: Each of the action cards has up to three elements:
First, each card shows a region. This will let you place tokens on the board. Depending on a card you'll either place nothing, one token in the depicted region, two tokens in the depicted region, or one token in the depicted region and one in any other region. These help determine majority control, as further discussed below.
Second, each card shows wagons. You get to move somewhere between zero and four wagons, dividing up the movement points however you want, but with wagons always moving westward. A four-point movement, thus, could be used to move one wagon four spaces, two wagons one and three (or two and two) spaces, four wagons one spaces each, etc. Wagons moving westward move through the regions East, Great Plains, Midwest, and West, also the regions where tokens (or "trading posts" as I like to call them) are placed.
Third, each card shows a cost between zero and six coins.
Basically if you play a card you must pay the cost (in tokens), and place tokens on the appropriate region track(s) and move the appropriate number of wagons. Take note that tokens are used both as majority-control pieces and "money" to pay for actions. This really threw me when I first went through the rules.
About Token Placement. The way that tokens are placed is one of the entirely original and interesting aspects of the game. Each of the central four regions has a "track" which is an eight-space circle. Tokens are placed here going clockwise from the partition pawn, which is a black marker taking up one of the spaces.
However when the track is filled (with the patition pawn plus 7 tokens) then when another token goes down, the partition pawn moves forward one space, the token that was in that space is returned to the player, and the new token goes down right behind it.
This means that as the game proceeds only the most recent 7 tokens are counted for majority control at any time, which is a neat twist. The partition pawn keeps track of which tokens are oldest and thus which will go next (but also which will help break ties, as further discussed below).
Play a Scoring Card: Each player has a deck of six scoring cards. They cost increasing amounts to play, according to a geometric progressions (mostly): 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 16. It's really hard to play those last few.
Whenever a scoring card is played every one of the four central regions scores.
Ideally each trading post (token) scores one point, however it must have a wagon to sell to in order to do so.
This means that if there are more wagons than trading posts, each of the trading posts score. If there are less, then the players with the most pieces in the region score first (in order of plurality). In the case of ties, trading posts score one at a time in clockwise order from the partition post (e.g., oldest to newest). Thus if red and blue had two each, and the order was red-blue-blue-red and there were three extra wagons, then blue would score 2 and red 1 due to the ordering.
Sell a Card: Alternatively you can sell any action card for its value in tokens.
Using the Double Move: If a player had a double-move pawn he may use it to take two actions in a turn. Usually a player will play an action card then a scoring card, to set himself up, then score. There are other possibilities. For example I used two action cards on my last play of my last game to set myself up, and then move some wagons to force the end of the game, triggering a final scoring.
When every player has used their double-move pawn they all get them back to use again.
Ending a Turn: After a player's turn is over he draws his hand back up to 7 cards.
Ending the Game: The game ends when someone has reached 50 points or when all of the wagons have been moved out of New England and the East; in the latter case a final scoring is initiated automatically.
Relationships to Other Games
Go West is a per-capita majority control game with unique placement mechanisms and strong shared scoring incentives.
Majority control usually brings El Grande to mind, but this one actually reminds me most of Moon & Weissblum's Mammoth Hunters. Like Mammoth Hunters, Go West! has per capita scoring: it's based on the number of pieces, and theoretically everyone's pieces can score, but those with a majority have an increased likelyhood to score. Also like Mammoth Hunters scoring depends upon an external source: there the mammoths, here the wagons.
As a game with "strong shared scoring incentives" in Go West! you have to set up players after you to score in a way that's still worthwhile for you. And you have to watch for players setting you up with relatively advantageous scoring. Fifth Avenue is another game that's used this tactic in recent years, and as with Fifth Avenue I think it's a pretty hard sell here. My general experience is that most gamers don't think this way, and thus shared scoring opportunities are neglected much more often than they should be. Colovini correctly realizes that shared scoring can be tricky, and thus he offers a second way to score with the double-move token, a very useful innovation.
Finally, Go West! is a fairly typical Colovini games. It's simple, it's abstract, it uses just a few mechanisms, but it has fairly interesting gameplay. I was happy to see it in a fairly small box, like Clans or Cartagena and not a large box like The Bridges of Shangri-la. Most of Colovini's games aren't dense enough to really serve as the cornerstone of a gaming night (after the first play or two, at least), and so the small boxes are nice, as they can be packed up as an appetizer or after-dinner desert. Go West! is probably a little denser than most of Colovini's other shorter games.
The Game Design
Go West! is at heart a very tough game. In playing it I sometimes feel myself virtually paralyzed. Because it's so hard to set things up for good scoring opportunities I feel like I'm just treading water, placing down tokens which in turn get picked up by other people. I'm fairly certain that good moves are possible, but you have to fairly heavily analyze to see them. By my second game I'd gotten pretty good at quickly counting how much a scoring would earn each player, and I'd started to better see moves that could push me to victory. But, it was hard, and it's not going to be for all players.
On the plus side, Go West! is a highly innovative game. The partition mechanism for majority control is really neat and I hope to see it again. The per-capita scoring with an external basis, although also seen in Mammoth Hunters, and the shared scoring setups, although also seen in Fifth Avenue, are both pretty untapped too.
On the down side, the toughness of the game is probably going to be it's biggest failing. I also feel like the game is quite fragile. Having bad players to your left or your right can seriously impact your ability to score. In addition, other players might score at bad times, just because it's hard to count. (In my last game one player scored, and when I counted things up later I realized that he'd given each and every player 4 points.) And, if one player refuses to use his double-turn pawn that whole aspect of self-reliance in the game can disappear.
I suspect a lot of players will hate this game, and would give it a "2" rating in Substance. However, as usual, I'm trying to rate this game based on its intended audience. If you like very analytical, tough games, and enjoy majority control, this is a nice, relatively short offering that will really get your brain working, and that will allow you to rise up in victory or fall down in defeat based upon the strength of your own play. On that basis it's a high "3" out of "5": slightly above average.
Conclusion
Go West! is, without question, a tough game. it's a lot of work figuring out how moves will affect scoring, what moves are good, and when you should score based on your own moves or those of other players. If you don't like having to seriously think during your games, don't bother with this one.
However, if you do like analytical games, and you're looking for a different type of majority-control, I think this one has some interesting, quirky, and innovative mechanics, and will do well as a pre- or post- (but not quite filler) offering.
