This week at game night we played Carson City. Carson City is a game of land grabbing, building money-generating properties, gun fights, and using the town’s “personalities†to your best advantage. The game has a lot going for it. The game only has four rounds and each round has the following phases. First each player chooses their personalities (or role) for the turn. Then, one by one, the players place their cowboys. They can use their cowboys to perform actions such as buying a building, or to grab a parcel of land, or to attack or defend a building. If cowboys from different owners end up on the same space, a duel ensues with the winner getting the spoils. After placement of the cowboys, the final phase is resolving each space on the board in a specific order as outlined on the board. It’s during this phase that victory points are earned, money is earned, and new buildings are constructed.
In our game I think Mike was a little distracted. He made a few starting blunders. He spent the rest of the rounds trying to gain back some momentum and cursing Owen for hog tying his mines so they produced less money for him. Ben on the other hand played well until the very last round when he made a fatal plunder of not playing all of his cowboys. Owen seemed to have problems throughout the game, not making any great gains and not scoring any victory points until round three. Mike, instead of being the mine owner he thought he was going to be, became the banker earning money hand over fist. Ben also earned tons of cash with his hotel and drugstores. He also warded off my attack on his money train by cleverly reading the rules and playing a church before I could take his money. (A church protects your nearby properties from being attacked.) In the end it was guns and firepower that won the game…for me that is. Using brute force I was able to win multiple duels allowing me to control most of the point scoring spaces. The others resorted to earning vast amounts of cash in order to buy their way to a win. Which points out something I like about Carson City—there are multiple strategies you can use to gain victory points.
As I mentioned, in our game guns won over cash, but it was close. Had Ben played all of his cowboys on the last round, things might have ended differently. Ben did come in a very respectable second. Mike was third and poor Owen was last.
Chaos Steve