Strike It Rich in the Board Game Boomtown of Gold West

By Keith Law | July 2, 2025 | 2:00pm

Tabletop Reviews board games

Strike It Rich in the Board Game Boomtown of Gold West

The game Gold West originally came out in 2015 from the publisher Tasty Minstrel Games, who were responsible for publishing many highly-acclaimed titles, including Spiel winner Village, Orléans, and Yokohama. Tasty Minstrel went bankrupt in 2021, however, and its titles ended up out of print and in search of new homes. Orléans got a new edition from Capstone last year; a new version of Yokohama is on its way from Synapses; and Gold West got a new lease on life last year from Trick or Treat in a new edition with a mini-expansion included.

Gold West is a pretty straightforward resource-management game at its heart. There’s a new mining boomtown sprouting up, and the players are in charge of mining outfits looking to make the most profit. They’ll explore a map of hex tiles to collect wood, stone, copper, silver, and gold. Wood and stone are building materials, and players can use them to build camps and settlements to expand their influence in the area. Players can use the three precious metals to fulfill investment cards for big points gains, or to move up the three shipment tracks (one for each metal), or to claim a space in the 3×3 Boomtown grid, which usually awards some conditional victory points at the end of the game. Once players have placed all 12 of their camps (or 10 in a four-player game), the game ends.

Most Popular

There’s only one aspect of Gold West that might be unfamiliar or confusing to new players, but of course it’s part of what makes the game interesting. When you gather resources, you place them in a ‘bin’ on your supply track, numbered 0 to 3. The farther down the track you place them, the more points you get, but you’ll have to wait longer to use them. And on your turn, when you take resources, you take all of the contents of one bin, then drop one resource from that batch into each lower-numbered bin until you reach the top of the board; whatever’s left at that point is what you get to use to build.

Turns have three parts, all fairly quick to execute. The first is to take the resources from one bin and run them up the supply track. Then you build a camp or settlement, as long as you have at least one wood or stone left over; you choose any face-up hex tile, replace it with your camp or settlement token, and then take the resources shown on the tile. You then place the tile in the matching row on your player board, based on the tile’s color. A settlement requires both a wood and a stone, and the only additional benefit it confers is that it counts for two spots on your board rather than just one if you placed a camp. There are points associated with these rows at game end. If you don’t have wood or stone, you have to loot, taking a mining tile’s resources, but discarding the tile instead of keeping it, and then placing a camp in the looting area; the two players with the most camps there at game end will lose some points.

The last step is to use your metals however you choose, taking multiple actions if you have the metal tokens to do so. You have a wagon on the copper, silver, and gold shipping tracks, and for each token of that type you discard, you move your wagon one space; there are points for getting past certain spots on the tracks and additional point tokens for the players who reach certain spaces first or second. Investment cards are just objective cards that require that you pay three to five metal tokens in a set combination, giving you points and sometimes another bonus like a free wagon movement.

The Boomtown region changes every game, and can inform your strategy if you get one of your influence tokens in there early on. These spaces give variable bonuses like an extra point for every camp you’ve placed next to an opponent’s, or two extra points for every investment card you’ve completed. It gives the game a lot of replayability; the tokens don’t change the entire game, but they give each session a new flavor. The included expansion adds another Boomtown token, and there are two promotional expansions (which I received with my review copy) that also each add a Boomtown token. One of those actually gives you back a point for every camp you have in the looting section, so that might be a more viable strategy if you can load up on metals instead.

When the game ends, you get two points for every camp/settlement in your largest contiguous area on the board, and the players with the most and second-most tiles in each row on the player boards will get bonuses. Add those to your in-game scores, take your looting penalties, and that’s your total.

Gold West just particularly spoke to me, to the point that I realized my grade for how much I personally like the game is probably a little higher than the grade I would give it as a (changes from silly hat to serious one) game reviewer, which isn’t that common for me. I find myself giving higher review grades than personal grades to games more often, because I can respect a game’s design but maybe not find it fun or entertaining enough to want to play it repeatedly. Gold West was the opposite; it feels like an old-fashioned board game in the best possible way. There’s something nostalgic in the board and the basic mechanics of the game, all of which make it a good family game, but maybe not one for the more serious gamer. It’s not hard to teach, it plays in under an hour, and the hardest part might be just setting up the modular board with its Boomtown and grabbing cups for all of the resource tokens. Tasty Minstrel had a lot of great games and I’m glad to see several of them, Gold West included, getting fresh editions.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.