Silver & Gold Review
“Arrrgh… now, where did we leave the Silver & Gold?”
“Ye mean ye dont know?”
“Arrrgh ye were the one who made the map!”
“Arrgh no, ye were!”
“Arrrgh ye mean we’re gonna have ta dig up this whole island!?”
“Arrrrrgghhh!”
Players: 2-4
Time: 20 mins
Designer: Phil Walker-Harding
Artist: Oliver Freudenreich
Publisher: Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag
100 ‘X’ – 1000 Treasures the box gleefully proclaims! A reviewer is constantly in search of the treasures buried amongst the new releases so I certainly have sympathy for the pirates searching high and low across the islands of Silver and Gold. Will Silver & Gold prove to be a treasure itself? Or will it be one to cross off your list? Grab ye shovel and a bottle o’ rum, we got some digging to do!
Silver & Gold is a ‘roll and write’ with a twist. Rather than a printed pad of paper sheets and pencils, here you have a deck of plastic coated cards and whiteboard markers. You will be writing on the cards themselves! Sacrilege! Yet it works perfectly, the cards wiping clean at the end of the game. Though they could have included a cloth in the box!
Far from just a gimmick, moving the action from score sheet to deck of cards opens the game up to some more interesting mechanisms. There’s a market of cards to draft from, set collection elements. Choices! You won’t be faced with identical options each time you play and that is perfect for the kind of filling puzzle Silver & Gold is.
When you’ve lost your treasure, the only way to find it is to fully explore those islands! Or something. I’m kind of making the theme up as I go here. Whether you find treasure or not, you’ll certainly get points for filling in all the spaces of an island and isn’t that the most important thing anyway? Each turn a new card is flipped from the explore deck, revealing a shape.
You must then fill in a matching block of squares on one of your two islands. Simple. Do these 7 times and a round is up, 4 rounds the game is over. Except such a simple process belies the thought you’ll be putting in. These islands are not big and they are often awkwardly shaped. They fill up quickly, so that even with two in front of you at any time, things can get very tight. If you cant fit the revealed shape on your island, you instead only get to fill in a single shape. Which can actually make it harder to finish an island!
Importantly though, that makes you acutely aware of your inefficiencies. When the wrong shape is revealed you make a sound like a pirate finding the grog barrel empty. Even just an awkward shape. And brilliantly the game pushes you to make life awkward for yourself.
Most islands have a scattering of special symbols that give you bonuses when you cross that space off. The Xs let you cross off any single space, perfect for those irritating spots. Collect 4 coins and you’ll gain whatever the highest valued trophy is on the global objective card. The palm trees score you points according to how many palm trees are visible in the island market. All of these are valuable actions but can be more valuable if timed well. If timed well.
There will be turns where you want to hit a symbol but doing so will inevitably make fitting future shapes that much harder. Likewise you might want to avoid a symbol until it is more effective to take. Perhaps there’s no palm trees in the market or an extra space is hard to place. This adds a lovely layer to your decision making and will likely be the difference between who wins and who loses.
Better yet, these elements make the game surprisingly interactive for a roll and write. You’ll care what others are doing. It is a race to grab those coin trophies, so you’ll be carefully checking others’ islands to compare progress. Likewise the timing of when to complete an island, in order to draft a new one, has a subtle interplay with the turn order. At the end of an action, any completed islands are replaced from the market, in player order, and without replacement. Thus, the difference between completing an island now vs later can be huge when it’s the difference between picking first or picking last, but that depends on whether anyone else can complete one of their islands.
OK so I’m not storming over to your island waving my cutlass and stealing your treasure but this isn’t the sort of solitary game you can play with 100 players at once (yes, Welcome To… can do this). Thanks to the addition of set collection style scoring the island draft can really end up mattering. What your opponents are doing truly influences your decisions.
Small games are easy to recommend. So long as they hold together well, the outlay in terms of both money and time is low so the pressure for the game to perform is lower too. Silver & Gold holds together very well. It manages to genuinely innovate on the roll and write formula but its unlikely to dramatically change your view of them, unless you have a particular thing for shape fitting. God knows, I do. Is it really ‘1000 treasures’ though? No. But as the forgetful pirates hopefully learn, the joy is in the journey. And I look forward to playing some more of this soon!
Leave a Reply