Released in 2017, Century: Spice Road was a game about trading spices. Also released in the same year, Century: Golem Edition offered (I'm told) the exact same gameplay as Spice Road, but with the theme of gathering gems to create giant-sized golems. I've played the Golem Edition a few times recently, and while I don't quite know what to make of the two different skins draped over the same game, I can say I found that game to be pretty good.
The gameplay is streamlined and simple. It's written on just one double-sided rules sheet, and can be explained in a minute or two. There are four colors of gems, of ascending values. A row of five cards shows different combinations of these gems to build different golems; each is worth some amount of points, and the game ends in the round when one player builds their fifth golem.
To accumulate the necessary gems, players work with a hand of cards in a system much like one of my personal favorites, Concordia. You must play one card from your hand on your turn. Each card either makes gems for you, or converts specific gems you have into specific other gems. You can take a turn off to acquire a new card for your hand, but when your hand runs out (or when the cards left in it don't help you), you must take a turn off to return all your previously played cards to your hand and start again.
It's a simple engine-building game. Because players obtain different cards for their hands, everyone's strategy/engine is slightly different. And yet the game keeps all the players in fairly close contention with each other (in pacing, if not necessarily in score) -- everyone approaches the game-ending condition of five golems at about the same time.
The nature of competition between players evolves throughout the game. Early on, there is competition to get desirable new "engine" cards. (You choose what you like from a row of options, but to pick from farther up the row, you must "bribe" each card in the row before it with one of your gems -- bribes which ultimately go to the person who takes that card.) Later on in the game, no one is really fighting over the gem-trading cards. Instead, competition gets fierce over the golems. Play is open enough that you have to watch (and can watch) whether one of your opponents is going to reach a particular combination before you can. With a strict one action per turn system, sometimes you're just too slow and have to resort to Plan B.
Luck does perhaps play a large role in the game. Having a card flip over at just the right time -- a particular golem or a particular gem-trading card -- can swing the game pretty hard for one player. Another liability in the game is how easy it is to cripple yourself when building a golem. Engines need fuel, and if you trade all your gems away, it can take you a long time to trade your way back to relevance.
But if the game can go bad in those ways, the upside is that at least it's quite a short game. Even with 5 players, even having to explain rules to some of them playing for the first time, the game can easily be finished in less than an hour. The pace also tends to increase, not decrease, as the game goes on. The decisions get faster and easier, as you're really beholden to the engine you've built. (Of course, the inability to change strategies on the fly could also be argued as a negative.)
For a fairly straightforward game, I did find Century: Golem Edition to be reasonably compelling. It seems to me to have potential as a crossover/gateway game for more casual players. (And perhaps the theme of gems and golems is better for that purpose than trading spices.) I give the game a B+.
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