Are you the roughest, toughest varmint west of the Pecos? Are you the quickest draw in the territory? Do you think you could be the next Henry Comstock? Well Yosemite Sam, grab your oversized hat, six shooters, mining pan and head for Coloma!
Coloma is published by Final Frontier Games, designed by Jonny Pac Cantin, and art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski.
Setup
Setting Coloma is a little on the daunting side. You place resources out on multiple spaces on the board including gold nuggets, river tokens, and bridges. You also place trackers on the frontier map, the round tracker, and the scoring track. Next, you place outlaws (black meeples) in the corral (I’ve dubbed it the Satisfactory Corral, OK was taken) and hotel cards in their spot on the board. Lastly we place the pieces for the game’s rondel. This is a wagon wheel on the board with two pieces that attach to the board with built in magnets (BRILLIANT!).
Each player takes a player board, their chosen color pieces (which include mini meeples called dudes), tents, a wagon wheel that rotates to different numbers 1-5, a wagon (their frontier map tracker), a regular sized pioneer meeple, a character ability card, and player cards. Each player places two dudes and a tent on their boards where the lodge is. They then take their colored player cards, shuffle them, and place them on the player board. Each player shuffles their player cards, drawing 6 and choosing 4 to keep. They then take the two they didn’t keep and place them either on the top or the bottom of their stack. This stack is both their draw pile and discard pile. Lastly, each player gets a horse (placed on their board), a gold nugget from the game board, and two bucks (poker chips). The first player receives the first player marker. The first player is the person who most recently watched a western. At my table, The Mandalorian counts as a western.
Gameplay
Coloma is played over 3 years with five rounds in each year. A round starts with moving the barker and bust tiles. This triggers the current event. Each round begins with a different event. The first four events give the players resources. The final event allows players to swap out gold nuggets for victory points. The players then simultaneously select sites where they will send their pioneers. They do this by rotating their wagon wheel dials and placing them face down on the table. Once everyone has placed their wheels face down they reveal their selections. Players now place their pioneers on the sites that they selected. It is then determined which site busts. This is done by finding the site that has the most pioneers. Players now rotate the bust token to that site and cover the boom action for that site. The players then take turns resolving their choices. This is where the first player marker comes into play. You start at site one and go around the wheel resolving player turns. If more than one player is at a site, the player with the first player marker goes first. If none of them have the first player marker, the player closest to the first player goes first.
The different sites allow for different paths to scoring. One allows for the player to earn resources off their player board and some buildings that they’ve erected. Another allows them to survey a canyon which gives them victory points at the end of the game and possibly resources. The third site allows you to expand your town by adding new buildings to their player board. These add the possibility of earning more resources or scoring victory points. The fourth site allows the player to move their wagon on the frontier map. Again this allows them to pick up more resources. The fifth site allows players to add dudes to the end of year shoot-out. They also get to add tents (settlements) to either the frontier map (victory points at the end) or events on the wagon wheel. These tents allow the player to earn double the resources on that event site. Lastly, they could place their pioneer on the rotating barker slot. This allows them to exchange currency for resources. The boom action allows them to take a barrel which gives the player a resource or action that they can use immediately or keep till they are ready to use. This has a negative side though. Each barrel taken adds more outlaws to the shoot-out.
After five rounds we determine the outcome of the shoot. The outlaws win if they have more individuals in the shoot-out than the prospectors. The winner of this and which pioneer has the most dudes involved in the shoot-out dictates what resources and victory points go to the pioneers. We now return used gold nuggets to the board (these have been collected in a mining cart), reset the outlaws in the shoot-out (each round increases the number of outlaws that start in the shoot-out).
After three years we move to end of game scoring. This is where surveying rivers, building bridges, buildings, hotels, and settlements on the frontier map come into play. Each one scores varying amounts of points. Leftover resources in most cases don’t score points (there are bridges that can make them valuable). The player with the most points wins!
Impressions- What could be better
The game doesn’t play well at 6 players. It is incredibly long at 6 players, especially when the players haven’t played the game before.
The barrels provide an added benefit to players that need more resources or need to use an action when it isn’t available to them. The fact that you can hold onto it and not use it right away seems somewhat pointless. In each of the games that I’ve played, the barrels were usually used right away. Saving them for later has potential, but is rarely used.
The first player designation is really not needed. The taking of turns can be done simultaneously, and really should be to shorten the game length. This is the only advantage the first player gets.
Impressions- What I liked
This is the first deluxified version of a game that I’ve ever owned, but it is definitely worth getting. Instead of looking at wooden blocks, you get molded plastic gold nuggets. Instead of plastic poker chips you get nice clay poker chips. Beyond that the components are above average. That makes game play so much nicer.
Theme is something that I normally cling to. I love it when a game’s theme is new and different. The theme of old west mining is not something you see on a regular basis. While it’s not oozing out of the game play, it does show hints of it in places. Particularly I like the economic mechanism that devalues the price of gold as more of it is placed in circulation.
Lastly, you are given multiple paths to victory. You can concentrate on growing your personal town by building hotels and different shops from your cards. You could focus on the frontier map by placing settlements on the map. You could even focus on surveying the canyons on your player board and building bridges across the rivers. In the end the one part of the game that tends to get overlooked is the shoot-out. This soaks up your dudes (which you need to do most of the other aspects of earning points), but it also helps put you in a position to earn more points than your competitors at the end of the year.
Overall
Coloma is a game that I was worried about when I backed it on Kickstarter. I’m fairly new to the gaming hobby and I wasn’t sure if I’d like the game mechanisms. I was scared that I wouldn’t like the art or the components. I was scared that I was ordering it just because I enjoy games based on history and that this one was going to fall short. Boy was I relieved when I got this one in the mail! Let’s start with the artwork. It’s cartoony without being childish. It reminds me of the western art that I saw as a kid in different youth magazines and television shows. Perfect for this type of game.
The component quality is excellent. Nothing was done on the cheap, which often happens with games today. Maybe I’m being fooled by the fact that I have deluxe copy, but I am really impressed overall.
Game play is good. Not great, but not bad. I enjoyed the idea of a rondel that adjusted available actions that players had each turn. Additionally, it adds a bit of gamesmanship to play. You have to try and guess where others are going to go and when they are going to go there so that you don’t miss out on the boom action. While the instructions tell you to try and table talk people into going to certain areas, I found that to be the last thing on my mind as I was setting up where I needed to go and when. Finally, the point scoring really is concealed during game play. You can get a bit of an idea of what people are doing well and which ones aren’t, but you really don’t know until you get to the end of the game and score everything out.
If you like a worker placement, hand management game with lots of bright pieces; give Coloma a try. You won’t be disappointed.
Thank you to our guest Reviewer Hank W. today for his insight!
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