Set in the Old West, Coloma has players engaging in a variety of activities: building up their western infrastructure, driving their covered wagon around to nearby towns to establish connections, fighting off lawless bandits that storm in, and building bridges over newly discovered rivers. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not too hard to process because of the clever action system at the heart of the game.
There are five different possible actions you can take each turn, arrayed on a wheel at the center of the board. Adding a wrinkle to the mix, a sixth action is shown on a dial that spins around the wheel each turn, covering up one of the five actions and replacing it with something else. All players plan their turn simultaneously, making a secret selection from the five available actions, then revealing and placing their workers simultaneously.
The core strategy in the game revolves around anticipating what the other players will do. That's because each of the five possible choices actually allows two actions, and "A" and a "B." And for whichever action is chosen by the most players, the "B" is canceled out -- a big red X covers that up, and all the players there only get to do the "A." So each turn, you have interesting considerations to account for in choosing which of the five things you will do. Is there something so important for you to do right now that you're willing to risk losing "half your turn" (while dragging down some opponents with you)? Can you wait for a turn, maybe doing something else this turn and getting two actions where most of your opponents will only get one? Ah... but is that rotating sixth action going cover up what you really need and make it impossible to take next turn?
There are additional nuances to all this: buildings you can construct to give you bonus actions when you choose a specific part of the wheel (including "insurance" for when you get X'd out), an intriguing "arrow" symbol on the wheel that can cause you to do the "A" from one part of the wheel and the "B" from a different part of the wheel, and more. But the core is simple: make plans, and try as much as you can not to make the same plan most other players are making.
It's a fun gimmick, and its presented in a fun way. The action wheel is right there on the board for all to see. Past games with similar "spinning wheels on the board" have been attached to the game board with a plastic brad, but Coloma uses magnets to affix the two layers of the dial in place. It's a simple pleasure, but it feels quite nice. Other fun components include a 3D mine cart in which to put the gold tokens players spend, and fun meeple shapes for the bandits. (There's also a deluxe version of the game, which the early Kickstarter backers received, with additional components that are quite beautiful.)
I've played Coloma several times now, and continue to enjoy it. I have only a couple of reservations about the game. The first is more of an unresolved question for me: I'm unsure of how the game works at higher player counts. Coloma takes up to 6 players, which is a true rarity for a worker placement game. It still moves briskly even with more players; because planning is simultaneous, the game doesn't take that much longer for more players, and you stay involved in it for more of that run time. But more players means more people to stay out of the way of. (Plus, ties for "which action was chosen by most players?" can have its own interesting effects.) You get X'd out more often with more players, which gives a big edge to a player clever or lucky enough to avoid that fate, say, two or three times more than anyone else. It's a good thing, I suppose, that the game's central mechanic matters even more with more players. But if it feels too much like luck and not enough like strategy, it undermines the reason you play a game like this. I haven't played it enough to say it's too luck driven for my tastes with six players, but I can say I do prefer the game with fewer players either way. (Though the option for six players is definitely nice.)
There's also the scoring of the game, which isn't quite as smooth as I wish it were. There are a handful of things that score for points during play. In the end, they probably amount to 20% of your score or less. That's enough that it's important to track, but not enough that it feels important compared to the massive scoring that happens at the end of the game. It just feels awkward to me to score some points during the game but not others, especially when some things you're not supposed to score until the end happen during play, can't be changed, yet aren't supposed to be tallied until the end. Perhaps I've played so many games with "a bit of endgame scoring" that I've become unreasonably accustomed to 80-20 splits the other way.
In any case, there are a lot of elements to Coloma that I'm taken with. It's been one of the few new games to make it to my group's game table multiple times, and it probably still has more life in it. I give it a B+.
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