The latest offering of Richard Garfield. While I loved Magic:tG, and we enjoyed quite a few rounds of King of Tokyo, this didn't grab me. I did lose the game rather badly, which may have affected the fun I had. But there was also very little I could do. The artwork is nice, but the game is quite expensive and for a game with such a huge amount of luck I am not willing to pay 50 euros.

The game is played in 5 rounds. At the beginning of each round the "treasures" are put on the board. There are four locations through which the party of greedy goblin hunts. The blue, green, and red areas that have actual treasures and the goblin cave. Treasures can have a positive value or a negative. So some treasures (like the stinky slimy boot I found) are not very desirable. Some treasures do not provide a flat bonus or malus but instead give bonus points to certain other things.

To get the treasures there is a card-drafting/selection round just as in 7 wonders. There are 3 types of cards: color cards that are played in the red/blue/green areas, hounds that are used in the goblin cave, and "special" cards that will modify your score in the colored areas.

Once the card selection is done, the game proceeds mostly in a deterministic fashion with little further interaction. You have to play all blue cards in the blue area. The players with the highest and the lowest scores of blue cards each gain one of the two treasures in that area. Same for red and green. In each area one can play bonus cards like the shrinking potion that reduces the strength of one of the cards one played in hopes of not taking home the stinky boot or getting the minimum score to get the nice goblet. There are cards that raise or lower score and the mule that provides further randomization by having you draw a card from the stack.

In the cave there are three opponents that you either have to bribe or fight with your hounds. Those that were vanquished by the hounds go to the player with the most hounds. As well as the gold the took for bribes from the other players.

My gripe with this game is that besides the card selection phase, every other element in the game is random or pre-determined. The only choices the player gets to make is the card selection and when to play bonus cards. This is way too little decision making. It also seems somewhat unbalanced with the hounds and the cave, and it was no surprise that the player who kept collecting all the hounds won by a large margin.