Silver&Gold – The Unboxinating!
Pandasaurus Games just recently had their spring cleaning sale and when you bought $X worth of games, they threw in a free copy of Silver&Gold or…some other game the Library already had. I forgot which one…maybe The Mind? The Game? Illusion? Anyway, I opted for the card game that the Library didn’t have and sent off my order. Honestly, I wasn’t even going to do an Unboxinating because card games…BOOOORING! Hey look! A deck of cards. Whelp, that was easy, see you next time. But then…
Number One: I turned the box over and found a deck of cards (wasn’t surprised) and some dry erase markers that you apparently use to DRAW ON THE CARDS (Very surprised). I gotta say, I felt that weird little feeling you get when you are an adult and you give yourself permission to do things your mom spent a lifetime drilling into your head not to do. Like eat ice cream for dinner (I’M DOING IT MA! AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME!), Or go outside with wet hair (DOING THAT TOO!) or draw on a pack of cards. Yeah, Mom, I’M DRAWING ON THE CARDS!
I did it too. For SCIENCE (they take the dry erase marker really nicely and it comes off really clean too). And because I really wanted to draw on the cards.
Number 2: Parts! You apparently get several decks of cards; Treasure Cards, Expedition Cards, Scoring Cards and a Round card. Plus the aforementioned markers. But you know what you don’t get? Erasers. I was lucky I picked a black shirt to wear today.
Number 3: This is a weird sized box. It’s bigger than a standard side by side Fluxx box but also slightly thinner. It happens to be exactly the same size as a Tiny Epic…Pirates? Zombies? A Tiny Epic Something box but about half the thickness of one (and probably less full of Tiny but I’m gonna fight you on S&G’s comparative Epicness. Dry erase markers, people!) Lastly, I kinda like the packaging. It’s nothing to write home about but everything fits neatly and it’s not going to knock around and get scrambled if you happen to toss your Silver&Gold in a bag to go take to Games Day.
Number 4: The Artwork. I want to draw your attention to the Question Cards (which I do believe are your Expedition deck). I don’t know why but that back really appeals to me. I also like the scroll bit on the reverse side and the little island touches for the Treasuer Deck. For a game which is basically “Use this Tetris shape to mark off squares on your grid and when you eventually cover all the spaces cool stuff happens” they grabbed this pirate treasure theme and incorporated it really well.
Number 5: Sometimes though, you can carry a theme a little too far. Take the starting player determination here. Most of the time games will have you do something easy, like having the oldest or youngest go first. There’s always going to be one of those unless you are all clones. Other times it’s a game driven dynamic like highest die roll, card closest to X number, the character whose birthday is closest to today; again something that’s going to be fairly easy to determine. But do you know when you last searched for buried treasure? I might say it was when I spent the summer digging holes in the patio embankment looking for my Jawa figure who disappeared in a mudslide. I may have been 9. Or possibly 10. If I can count clams as buried treasure, then I can move up to 32 when the dog and I were playing clam fetch (don’t ask). The point is, looking for buried treasure isn’t something a lot of adults do on the regular. I’m willing to bet most games of Silver&Gold lag at the start player determination as everyone tries to figure out what constitutes buried treasure or when the last time they went digging for it.
Lastly :
