Two Rex Plays #17 - Silver & Gold
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Silver & Gold, a flip & write treasure hunting game designed by Phil Walker-Harding and illustrated by Oliver Freudenreich. Explore treasure maps by drawing expedition cards that allow you to mark-off polyomino shaped areas, taking special actions when you discover coins, palm trees, and ‘x marks the spot’ symbols.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Wipe clean cards – The most significant design choice is to go without a player sheet, something you’d typically expect to see in flip & write games to mark progress and resources. Instead, players draw directly onto their map cards, a small additional scoring card, and another card which doubles up as a ‘first player’ token. From a design perspective, this is an elegant solution that removes a component and streamlines in-game admin. The tactile nature of marking directly onto the card is also thematically consistent with the idea of exploring a treasure map.
Shared expedition cards – A single expedition card is flipped on each turn and the corresponding polyomino shape is used by all the players. This reduces the down time compared to the alternative approach of each player drawing their own card, as well as increasing the sense of fairness. This choice matches the speed of the game and the decision space which largely requires knowing which polyomino shape is going to be available before any choices can be made.
Default action – If you’re unable to use the expedition card because you don’t have the correct space free on your treasure map, you take the fall-back option of marking off a single unexplored square on a map of your choice. This default actions is relatively powerful (in fact, it’s the same as the ‘x marks the spot’ special action symbol) as it allows you to remove an awkward corner or fill in any holes that would otherwise be unplayable. A strong default action reduces the frustration of not being able to take a traditional turn.
Functional first player marker – Rather than a token, the first player marker is a card which serves several functions: a useful aide memoire as to what polyomino shapes are in the deck; a space to mark off the rounds as you complete them; and a place to keep track of the rewards that are available when a player collects enough coins.
Choice of maps – Players start the game by drawing four map cards at random, but then choose two to retain before returning the rest to the deck. There’s also a common pool of four face-up treasure maps that all players can draw from once they’ve completed one of their starter cards. These choices create room for some strategic manoeuvring and unlock secondary ways of scoring which rely on a mechanism that matches up completed map types.
This final point of the choice of maps stood out to us as it’s something we’ve been considering recently in one of our ideas. That’s also a flip and write that’s meant to be a light experience, but we were struggling with the balance between randomness and strategy in the way players pick our equivalent of the treasure maps. If they are completely random allocated by blind drawing, then the ability to strategise is almost entirely removed and you’re left responding to the hand that fate dealt you. That can be fun in the right circumstances (e.g. particularly quick games, or ones where you draw cards frequently and each individual card is of limited impact) but we’re aiming for something that rewards some basic strategy. We’ve come up with similar ideas to those seen here – a starting card which you actively choose, and then a pool of reserved cards that you pick from later in the game.
Interested in Silver & Gold? Find out more here:
Playthrough video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqN0vQqG6Bo
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