Gold Digger is a Reiner Knizia game produced by Out of the Box games as part of their "Easyplay" series. The goal of a game in this series is to be easy and quick to play, both of which Gold Digger succeeds at.
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 10-15 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Gold Digger has just a few components in it:
- 6 Mine Cards
- 30 Character Cards
- 15 Gold Cards
- 15 Fool's Gold Cards
- 15 Claim Tokens
All of the cards are printed on 4-color glossy card stock of average thickness with rounded corners. They look like they'll stand up to continued play.
The 6 mines depict 6 different locales from which gold can be harvested during the game. They're all essentially the same picture, but color coded to one of 6 mine colors and labeled with the name of the group mining that particular location (explorers, townfolk, settlers, prospectors, outlaws, or the law). It's easy to distinguish the mines from the rest of the cards, because they don't have the standard Gold Digger back--which is great because you need to separate them out at start.
The 30 character cards depict 30 unique individuals who are mining those 6 locales, divided 5 characters to each of the mine types. They're color-coded and marked by the same groups to make linking up the characters and mines easy. Some of the colors are really too close together (in particular a blue and two purples), but fortunately the inclusion of the names makes it harder to make mistakes. Each of the characters also has a funny name: one of the Settlers is The Sunburn Kid while Dances with Rocks is a Prospector.
The fool's gold cards universally depict a single bag of gray, worthless rock. The gold cards instead depict between 1 and 8 bags of shiny, worthwhile gold.
All of the cards feature John Kovalic artwork. The mines and characters are all colorful, funny, and beautiful. They add a tremendous amount to the game. In contrast the gold is very boring, showing repetitive bags against a white background. One of our players commented that they'd have been much more interesting if the gold cards showed happy or sad prospectors, with a clearly marked number on the card, rather than using the bags.
The claim tokens are cheaply manufactured tokens in 5 colors for the 5 potential players in a game.
The rulebook is printed on a trifold of very sturdy, glossy cardstock. It's got a pretty plain layout but has some useful diagrams and is easy to follow.
Overall, the game is quite pretty to look at. This is mainly on the strength of the John Kovalic artwork on the character and mine cards--paired up with a good layout of that artwork. Especially when given the very low price point of this product, it's clear that it's got above average components, giving it a "4" out of "5" for Style.
The Game Play
You start off Gold Digger by putting down the 6 mine cards in the center of the table, then shuffling up all the rest of the cards--the characters, the gold, and the fool's gold. Each player is then dealt 3 cards.
In turn each player takes the following three actions:
- Play a Card
- Stake a Claim
- Draw a Card
The card played will, clearly, be one of those three aforementioned card types.
Characters are placed above their appropriate mine. A player may only stake a claim on the same round as he's played a character on the same mine (more on that in a second).
Gold and fool's gold are each placed under any mine that has less than 5 gold/fool's gold cards already placed on it (5 is the limit on these cards before a mine is done).
After playing his card, a player may optionally decide to stake a claim on a mine, as long as he just played a character card on that mine. As you may recall from the components description, each player only has 3 claim markers. Multiple players can all stake claims on the same mine.
Each player turn closes off with the replacement of that card that was played.
It's all pretty simple. Play continues until all 60 cards have been drawn and played.
At the end of the game everything's scored. The value of each mine is equal to the sum of all the gold bags on that mine (fool's gold is worth nothing). That's then divided by the number of claim tokens on the mine, rounding down. Note, that's the number of claim tokens, not the number of players, so if you have two claim tokens on a single mine, you will indeed get a larger share.
As a few examples:
- A mine worth 3 gold with 1 claim marker would earn that player 3 gold.
- A mine worth 7 gold with 3 claim markers would be worth 2 gold to the player of each of those claim markers.
After adding everything up the player with the most gold wins.
Game Variants
As you'll see when you get down to Game Design, I have some issues with the randomness of the game and the inability to negatively affect other players without negatively affecting yourself as well. I think a lot of this has to do with fool's gold not being an important enough force; my gaming group came up with several alternatives to improve this aspect of the game, though we haven't tried any out yet. They include:
- Make each gold mine limitless (ie, not bound by 5 cards)--until 2 bags of fool's gold are played in a row (maybe 3).
- Make each bag of fool's gold negatively affect its mine (e.g., it's actually worth -1 bag of gold or maybe -2).
- Limit each mine by the number of bags of gold rather than by 5 cards (e.g., if each mine was limited to 8 bags of gold, and each fool's gold card was counted as 2 bags of gold, then playing those fool's cards would have a fairly notable result in limiting eventual mine production).
- Have fool's gold take up more than 1 card/space in a mine.
I'm not sure about any of this numbering, but I'm fairly confident that somewhere in these possibilities you could make the game much more strategic, and much less based on the draw of lucky cards.
Relations to Other Games
This game seems to be closely related to two other Knizia designs: his Grand National Derby games and Kingdoms.
Like the Grand National Derby games players place claims ("bets") on various mines ("horses/monsters/alien races") and then play various cards to make those claims more or less valuable. It'd be very easy to incorporate some missing elements from GND into Gold Digger, such as the ability for each player to place one "secret bet".
Like Kingdoms you have players taking control of various locales and the value of those locales increasing or decreasing through gameplay.
Frankly, I think Grand National Derby (or more specifically, Titan: the Arena) and Kingdoms are both considerably better games than Gold Digger. They're not as short and they're not as cheap (and actually I think they're currently both out of print in an English translation), but unless you're specifically looking for a short game, they're probably better options.
The Game Design
Gold Digger does a good job of meeting some of its primary criteria for success as a "easyplay" OTB game. It's simple, it's quick, and it's very easy to learn. As a one-off party game it might work fine.
However, some flaws in the game, already noted above, leave the strategy problematic. In particular:
Hard to Negatively Impact Other Players: If a player is in the lead, your array of choices to stop them is fairly limited. The most effective thing you can do is jump a successful claim, by placing your own claim token on a mine that they're successfully exploring. However that tends to limit not just them, but you as well, and thus is a largely sacrificial strategy. The other thing you can do is play fool's gold to one of their successful (or solely owned) mines, but through play we found this to be almost worthless. For example in one of our games we carefully played 4 fool's gold cards to a single-player owned mine, only to have the owning player end things by dropping down an 8 gold card. (He tied for winning the game.)
Best Cards Overly Powerful: Closely related is the fact that the 8-gold card (and the 6) is very powerful. In both of the games we played most players didn't make it to more than 8 points! The top strategy seems to be simply to hold onto this card until late in the game when it can be played on a player's mine with little chance of claim jumping. Some of the rules variants suggested above might have offset this, but overall the 8 and 6 are probably offbalancing in the game. Clearly the power of these couple of cards also leads to a large random factor in the game.
Many Wasted Turns: Both early in the game and late in the game a player finds that his card plays don't really matter. Early on no claims have been made and later on things are pretty much decided. In addition the character cards become increasingly worthless as more and more claim tokens are played (or mines are mined out), yet players are stuck playing them. The aforementioned "secret bet" could help out with the end-game doldrums, while a discard method could also have been useful.
Overall, I find Gold Digger somewhat flawed as anything more than a quick party game. It's possible that some of the variants I suggest might help this out, but without them I'd give the game an average "3" out of "5" for Substance, and comment that I'd rather have Titan and/or Kingdoms in my game closet.
Conclusion
If you're looking for a quick party game, this isn't bad, and is definitely worth the cost. Out of the Box Games should be applauded for coming out with such economical games from major designers. As a more serious strategic design, Knizia's done better in this particular subgenre of design.
Review Summary