Hidden Gold?

I recently played a new "(blank) and write" game that, while not becoming a personal favorite of mine, feels like a great new option for the gaming hobby at large. "And writes" are perhaps the most popular trend in board games right now (write now?). They're games in which players take turns by marking off things on a personal score sheet, modern successors to the general idea behind Yahtzee.

In Silver & Gold, from designer Phil Walker-Harding, the system is "flip and write": turn a card face up from a very small shuffled deck. That card shows a geometric shape made up of 3 or 4 squares (think Tetris). You have to cross off squares in that shape on one of two dry-erase island cards you have in front of you. Islands come in many different configurations, take 8 to 14 squares to complete, and are worth points equal to the number of their squares when you do. (You then select a new island from a face up array of four to begin working on.) Repeat until you've gone through the deck of shapes (using every card except one) four times.

There are a few other small wrinkles, but what's distinctive about Silver & Gold compared to other "and write" games is how simple those wrinkles are. There's scoring based on palm trees on some island squares, scoring based on gold coins you can "dig up" on your islands, and scoring based on "suit colors" of islands. In the time it would take you to explain, say Welcome To... to a large group and stumble very awkwardly through a first round, you could teach, play, and put away Silver & Gold.

It's actually fairly debatable whether this is actually more or less complicated than Yahtzee. Perhaps it's just a "lateral move," in that it's more visually and spatially oriented. I make no claim that it will scratch any deep strategic itch for experienced gamers. (But there is a little strategy: watch the reference card that shows you all the shapes left in the deck, and try to leave yourself "outs" to draw efficiently on your islands.) If you're a serious gamer who doesn't already have a go-to "quick 20 minutes at the end of the night" game, you might want to consider adding this to your collection.

But I do feel there's great value here as a "crossover game." There's plenty of praise for hit games like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and the like, to bootstrap people into more serious games. Unlike those games, Silver & Gold doesn't feel like it's trying to be "a little more complex" to coax a would-be gamer a bit farther down the road of enlightenment. Instead, Silver & Gold feels to me like it could open eyes in showing people that "games can be simple and fun without looking quite like the ones you know." You don't roll dice, or move around a board, or keep a secret hand of cards. Silver & Gold might be the crossover game to Crossover Games.

And it even steers clear of the one element that I personally dislike in most "and write" games -- player experiences do diverge meaningfully. Although everyone is given the same shape to draw on every turn, each player has their own set of two cards different from everybody else's... and they continue to choose new and different island shapes every time they finish a card. True, the interaction is fairly minimal (coming from details in the gold and palm tree scoring), but it's not solitaire, and it's certainly not "many people playing solitaire together at one table."

So overall, I give my thumbs up to Silver & Gold. Realistically, to grade it alongside other games I truly love, I would give it perhaps a B at most. But I certainly think it's a game with an audience that I hope it finds.