Pioneer Days

Pioneer Days comes highly recommended by Buddhima. I have never heard of this game before. It never made any big splash when it was first released. Now this is a rare game. It is a solid design. It has an interesting balance of competition and collaboration, and combo development. 

Every round, a number of dice equal to one more than the number of players are randomly drawn from a bag. They are rolled and the die faces determine the actions available for the round. Everyone drafts a die to perform actions. The last die not claimed will cause something bad to happen.

The dice are placed on the board following the icons on the die faces. Notice on each of the spaces, there is a money amount above the icon and also a character card placed below it. When you take a die, you have three options. You take the resource (or action) according to the die, or you take money, or you claim the character. 

This is your player board. It is a reference sheet - equipment abilities are listed here. The player boards differ and offer different powers and starting resources. You have a wagon on the right, and this is storage space. Items like wood, gold, equipment and medicine need storage space. You can spend money to buy more wagons. Cattle does not take up space. You just place them along the top of your player board. 

Every few rounds, you reach a town, and this is a scoring opportunity. You trade items in for points.  What can be traded and for how many points is determined by scoring cards. You can see these scoring cards at the start of each leg of your journey, so you can prepare for it. 

This board is mainly a score track. There are spaces for used dice, so that you can keep track of what's still in the bag. 

Let’s talk about disasters. Dice come in five colours. Four of them correspond to four different disasters. Each disaster has a track of three steps. The leftover die from each round will move a marker on one of these disaster tracks. When the marker reaches the third space, disaster happens and everyone suffers. The marker is then reset. When you claim a die, you need to consider which colour might be left behind and how badly each of the disaster types will affect you. Black is the worst. If a black die is left behind, all four markers will advance. The disaster mechanism creates many interesting situations. You can intentionally trigger disasters which hurt others more. You can pressure others into making suboptimal moves in order to protect themselves from disasters. You plan your resource collection around the possibility of disasters. Sometimes you need to collect enough money in time to pay for your cattle and not lose them. Sometimes you try to spend all your money just before the robber comes so that you don’t have anything to lose anyway. 

Characters give you various abilities, like one-time benefits and end-game points. However you need to have some medicine ready for each of  them. When disease strikes (it's one of the disasters), shortage of medicine means some characters will be, ummm, removed from service.  

When you dig for gold, you blind draw a token which may have 1 to 3 pieces of gold. 

Player score markers are brown, brown, brown, and off white. 

It is scary to see three black dice

Pioneer Days has an interesting dice drafting mechanism which defines the core game experience. You jostle with your opponents to gather resources and prepare for disaster. You go through this cycle of accumulating resources then spending them for points at the next town. The disasters are also a kind of cycle, but the timing is not fixed. You need to be prepared for when they happen, to minimise your losses. 

Jon, Ji Li, Buddhima and I