Pioneer Days Review

Out on the great plains, pursuing a life that is independent, free! These are the Pioneer Days. Pressing westward into unspoilt territory, keeping your wagons intact and praying you don’t get dysentery. Oh God, please don’t get dysentery. Yes, you can almost smell the freedom! Or perhaps that’s the… cows.

Players: 2-4
Time: 45-60 mins
Ages: 14+
Designer: Matthew Dunstan, Chris Marling
Artist: Guille Longhini, Sergi Marcet
Publisher: Tasty Minstrel Games

Life may have been hard during the Pioneer Days, but the rulebook certainly isn’t. Which makes for a pleasant change in the battlefield of medium weight Euro games. It’s a dice drafting game and while it’s certainly a Euro, it also threatens to be thematic too! I know… the preacher won’t like that.

Walking 9 till 5

Over the course of 4 in-game weeks, you and your fellow pioneers will gather, well, lots of things. Wood for mending wagons, medicine for healing people, equipment for various bonuses, gold because, well, gold, and of course cows for showing off about. All in the most ludicrously thick card that makes me wonder whether the pursuit of high quality components has maybe gone too far? Except the cows. They quite rightly come in wood. Moooo-hogany perhaps.

On a given turn, some dice will be drawn and rolled and you will take one of them. You can trade it in for money, the townsfolk card beneath the matching symbol on the board, or for the basic resource bonus associated with that die. The townsfolk, who are all unique and often quite interesting, give immediate or on going abilities and will score you end game points for collecting a given resource type. It’s a suitably straightforward system that keeps the teach short and the game moving reasonably quickly.

Points were, of course, that great purpose all Pioneers were pursuing (you’ll probably have heard of the Great Points Rush of 1848). You earn points from a few areas: cows, which are each worth a point at the end of each week, gold worth whatever nuggets it has on it at game end, the townsfolk who all give you points for something. Hence a large part of the game (and life) is trying to find the best combination of people to hang round with. At the end of each week you can also have a nice rest in some local towns and trade in your hard earned stuff in exchange for… favour tokens, worth lots of points, and which will certainly keep your belly full…? I feel like your noble pioneers are being conned here. But hey! Points!

On the bright side, these little I-owe-yous don’t take up the valuable real estate in your wagons. You’ll want that for your emergency supplies, the cart-loads of gold you’ll be picking up from the ground and your valuable equipment. The rich mix of equipment pieces, whose key takes up the majority of your player boards, offer all kinds of useful benefits. Many of which trigger when you take specific dice faces. Planning out a selection of equipment to get maximum benefit is a mini game in and of itself.

Disaster!

So far so pleasant ride in the countryside. Ambling along, day by day, picking up a gold nugget here, a gap-toothed hillbilly there, and generally enjoying life on the open road. I’ve got some bad news for you though. There are disasters ahead! Each turn a die won’t get chosen and the colour of that die decides which of the 4 disaster tracks advance. Unless everyone has been extremely selfish and left a black die – then they all advance!

You may have noticed all that medicine and wood you were supposed to be picking up and wondering, why? There’s so many coins too, you can only want so many wagons. Well, all of these items are needed for when a particular disaster strikes. The blue storm track will damage all of your wagons, but spending wood can block this damage. The red raid track takes half of your money, just before the yellow famine hits, requiring you pay one coin for each cow you want to still have. The final disease track is the dysentery you’ve all been waiting for. Only medicine will keep your townsfolk cards alive!

This disaster system is what makes the game. It adds a huge dollop of tension, keeps you constantly evaluating whether you can risk taking good stuff ahead of greater protection, forces careful management of resources. It is inherently interactive too, your choice of dice directly affects how quickly each disaster occurs so when you see your friend gathering a horde of cows you drive up the famine track as much as you possibly can! Better yet it takes a fairly dry Euro and brings it to life thematically.

It really feels like a journey into the wilderness. You set out with your little wagon and a few possessions, full of hope and excitement for your new life. You meet new friends, you collect more cattle, your wagon becomes a caravan. Your first couple of weeks pass by with maybe a minor hiccup but nothing you couldn’t handle. Then, about halfway through, you suddenly realise you might have a wagon load of gold, but did you pick up any medicine? Any wood? Did you f***! And now little Johnny is looking awful green and are those storm clouds on the horizon? Oh… oh dear.

The game turns into a desperate battle for survival. You don’t stop in towns to help, you’re too busy running away from the bandits. “Oh you’ll owe us a favour will you! I’m travelling West! How am I supposed to collect on it?” Do you really need all that gold? “I let Granny die rather than give up any gold, you think I’m giving it to you!?”

But then you crest a final rise and you see it! The end of your journey! The West! The smiles on your little band’s faces are something to behold, and not just because half the teeth are missing now. You try to smarten the place up, gather a few likely point scorers and hope beyond hope nobody does anything stupid with the last few dice. What a trip.

Pioneer Days manages to pitch itself perfectly. An enjoyable puzzle of efficiency and combo hunting, featuring the schadenfreude of watching an opponent’s plans be wrecked, but only if they take too many risks, an impressively well implemented theme and none of it causing much rules complexity. On top of that, you have a huge degree of replayability from the different sets of townsfolk and player powers. It manages to be a game that will please a lot of different gamers!

Rating: Pioneering

Our copy of Pioneer Days was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get hold of a copy for £54.99 RRP, from your local hobby store.