Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 90-120 minutes
The Components
Carson City comes with a box full of cardboard and wood.
The Game Board: A six-panel, lightly textured gameboard. The coolest thing about the gameboard is that it's double-sided. You have a basic board on one side and a more advanced board (with a river) on the other. I wish more games made use of their board backs, and I'm always thrilled when I find one that does.
Each side of the board is dominated by a plain 8x8 grid, which is where the future Carson City will be placed. Each also has an action track, which contains the spaces for all the stuff you can do--including some places to put buildings that are up for bid. The iconography on these spaces is generaly simple and easy to follow.
Cardboard Bits: You get a large number of tiles in the game. They are all printed on thick, linen-textured cardboard.
Houses, mountains, and buildings are all placed on the board. The first two tiles don't have info other than decorative pictures. All of the buildings, however, have icons that tell you how much money they earn, whether they supply you with guns, and how they earn income. The iconography is just slightly impenetrable for first-time players--but that's probably largely due to the fact that there are a lot of varieties of buildings. As you become more familiar with the game, the icons will become more obvious. The income values are a particularly good innovation, because they let you record the current income of a building (based on how you position the building), rather than counting it up each time.
The property tiles are slightly bigger than those other tiles and printed in the five player colors (orange, green, blue, yellow, brown). They actually go under the buildings, houses, and mountains so that you mark when you claim them. THey also conveniently have an arrow on one side, which you can point toward the current income on a building atop it.
Money is likewise printed on cardboard. It's printed as $1s, $5s, and $10s--all of which have different sizes and colors--and $20s--which are rectangular bills. The money is quite easy to tell apart as a result.
The personalities are the only truly beautiful element among the components (with the rest being more often than not fairly plain). Each personality tile shows a local who can help you out--from the sheriff to a mercenary--and includes icons telling you what they do. Again, the icons will take a little bit to get used to, but are pretty readable. Good use has again been made of the backsides, which provide alternative characters that you can use for variant games.
Finally there are some revolver tiles (which just help you to keep track of your guns); some duel tiles (which support yet another game variant); and a round counter.
Bag: A small cloth bag is supplied so that you can randomly draw the building tiles.
Wooden Bits: Each player gets 10 cute cowboy meeples in their color; there's a sheriff too. In addition each player gets two wooden discs in their color, to mark turn order and victory points.
You also get some huge wooden dice and some wooden roads (which can run in between tiles).
Player Info Cards: Two cardstock player info cards help you to keep track of the more subtle variations between the buildings (and also remind you of the actions in a round). These are a great help for new players.
Overall, the components of Carson City are great quality. Real effort has also been put into the usability, which on balance is good (and entirely necessary for a game of this complexity). Beyond that, I think the theming is quite good, and I really applaud all of the game variants, some of which required extra components. The only downside among the components is that there's relatively little spectacular art--but I'm not actually sure there's space for it because so much is going on in this game. As a result of all of that I've let Carson City eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style. There's little I would change.
The Gameplay
The object of Carson City is to earn the most points primarily by making money as the small western town slowly develops.
Setup: The gameboard of Carson City is set up with 9 mountains and 1 house (the center of town) being randomly positioned through the roll of the dice. A set of four roads surround that initial house. Finally, a sequence of seven buildings available for sale is placed on the action track at the top of the board.
Each player is given $15, 1 gun, 1 road, and his own components. He gets to take 3 cowboys to start his first round with. Then each player places two property tiles on the board.
Property Tiles. These tiles are used to mark ownership of spaces. They're required to later build buildings. They can also give you the exclusive advantage of houses or mountains that score points for adjacent various buildings.
Order of Play: The game is played over four rounds, each of which has four phases:
- Choose a Personality
- Place Your Cowboys
- Duel & Perform Actions
- Gain Income
- End the Round
Choose a Personality: There are 7 personalities available, and each game you get to choose one of them to help you out. Each of these personalities has a special power (e.g., the Banker gives you $9, the Settler gives you free placement of a parcel marker, and the Mercenary gives you 3 bonus guns for the turn). Each personality also has a cash limit, which is how much cash you can carry over at the end of the round. It runs from $20 (for the Sheriff or the Mercenary) to $120 (for the Banker).
Place Your Cowboys: One at a time, players place cowboys on the board. This is essentially an action-selection phase. The cowboys are either placed along the action track at the top of the board or else are placed on the 8x8 grid of Carson City.
As with most worker-placement games, only one player can take (most) actions. Unlike most worker-placement games, you can place a worker on an action that someone else has already selected. This will result in a duel (gunfight) later in the round.
There are over 20 actions that workers can take, plus the general actions allowed by placement on the game map. Here's what the actions generally allow:
Resource Acquisition. There are spaces that allow you to take money, guns, or roads.
Building Acquisition. Each turn, 7 buildings are placed on the action track. They are available for purchase for between $3 and $12. After you buy a building you may immediately place it one of your parcels. Most buildings must also be connected to the town center by roads (which will slowly snake out from the center of town as the game goes on).
A few buildings immediately give you guns. Most of them give you income later in the turn.
Most buildings require a residence to be simultaneously built. This is free, but it has to be connected to the road system, which might require some additional road building. Building a residence can actually be a big plus, because they increase income for many buildings, as noted below.
Additional Money Sources. A few actions give you the opportunity to earn money based on how many parcels or guns you have--or even based on a random die roll.
Victory Point Sources. A few actions give you victory points based on how many parcels, guns, or buildings you have. Many give you victory points in exchange for money, at ratios running from $2:1 to $5:1. The better spaces go away as the game goes on. However, you might take a worse space even early in the game to avoid a duel.
On-Board Placements. There are two ways that you can place your cowboys on board in order to take special actions.
First, you can place your cowboy on an empty space to claim that parcel for your own. This costs $1 or $2.
Second, you can place your cowboy on someone else's building in order to steal half their income from that space. As you might guess, this often causes duels.
Duel & Perform Actions: After all the cowboy placement is done (and you don't have to spend all of your cowboys, but instead can save them for future rounds), then the actions are taken in a specific order. Whenever there is an action that has multiple cowboys competing for it, a duel occurs.
In the basic game, this means each player rolls a die, adds their number of guns, and adds the number of cowboys they have in reserve. The player who wins gets to take the action. The player who loses gets his cowboy back for future placement.
Whenever a cowboy is used to take an action, it's used up and does not immediately return to you.
Gain Income: The income phase actually occurs in the middle of the action phase, just before you have the opportunity to exchange money for victory points.
Each type of building gives income in unique increments and by unique methods. The ranch, for example, gives income for empty spaces around it, while the mine gives income for mountain spaces around it, and the saloon gives big money for residences around it. Other buildings give money for other combinations of things you own and buildings surrounding it.
There's one big gotcha: several buildings earn money from adjacent residences, but only for residences where you own the property or no one does. Therefore, when you claim a residence, you can deny money to your opponents. (The same is true for mines and mountains.)
End the Round: At the end of each round, each player gets new cowboys and new buildings are placed on the action track. Each person now must decrease his money to his 'cash limit'; if he has too much he can turn it into victory points at a $10:1 ratio. Finally, the personality tiles goes back for reselection each round.
Some Other Notes: There's considerable minutia that I haven't discussed here--from the specifics of the actions on the track to some special powers that certain buildings give you. Suffice to say, Carson City is a fairly dense and intricate game.
Ending the Game: The game ends after the fourth round of play. As with the other rounds, each player has to drop down to their cash limit. Afterward they may spend any remaining cash for victory points at a $6:1 ratio.
Any buildings, residences, and mountains that you own also earn you 2 victory points each; the player with the most victory points is the winner.
Variants: There are several variants. The most notable is the "might is right" variant which lets players select tiles during duels rather than rolling dice. The result is somewhat less random than the original game.
Relationships to Other Games
Carson City is a worker placement game. It reminds me the most of Caylus, the worker-placement game that got the whole subgenre started. However, it's also got a SimCity-like element that goes hand-in-hand, as Carson City somewhat organically expands, based on what's been built already and the needs of those buildings. The result is quite unique.
The Game Design
Carson City is a thoughtful and enjoyable strategy game.
The worker-placement element is certainly the type of thing we've seen before, but the possibility of duels adds a whole new dimension to it. You have to think about whether you're grabbing actions that other players might want, and you also have to think about whether you're willing to try and steal something from someone else.
The city map also adds another dimension--or two dimensions, really--to the game, as you get to coordinate exactly how your actions impact the growing and evolving town.
There is plenty of opportunity for lots of different sorts of gameplay. You can try and strategically plan out your expansion over several turns. You can tactically grab opportunities that other people have left open. You can engage in brinkmanship, taking actions that you're probably not well-enough off to defend, and you can try and bluff about your strengths too.
Beyond that, there are several different routes to victory. Guns, money, property, and specializing in several different types of buildings are all well supported by the action system.
The only complaint that people might have about Carson City is the random and chaotic possibilities mainly implicit in the duels. However, the author already prepared for this by including the tile-based dueling system, which at least reduces the luck.
Overall, Carson City is clearly one of the strongest serious strategy games of the year. Players who enjoyed Caylus and its many worker-placement successors should be especially certain to take a look.
Carson City
Carson City is a well-produced game of western town-building, full of gunslingers, duels, cattle, and everything else you'd want in a western. It's also an excellent strategy game that should win the approval of most players look for the next big thing in eurogaming.
