Inspired Design: Backpacks in Goldland

I worked on a video project for most of the weekend and didn't have time for games, but last Thursday I played Goldland with Flint, whose studio is across the hall from mine. He hadn't played a German game before and really liked it. We're going to try play a game every Thursday afternoon.

Goldland is a resource management and exporation game by Wolfgang Kramer, who designed one of the best board games of all time, El Grande. In Goldland, players gradually build the board by laying tiles. Collecting resource tokens from tiles allows a player to enter other tiles and survive "adventures" such as crossing a desert or confronting a bandit. The goal is to collect the most gold, and much of it is at a temple at the opposite side of the 7 x 7 grid from the starting space. Here's a picture of the game.

One of the most elegant design features are the "backpacks" tiles on which players store their resources and gold. Collected tokens are placed on spaces numbered from 1 to 12 beginning with the highest number. The highest uncovered number is how far you can move on your turn. For example, if I have three resources tokens, I place them on the 12, 11 and 10 spaces in my backpack. I can move 9 spaces on my turn. The idea is that the more items you place in your backpack, the heavier it becomes and the more difficult it is to walk. This is a brilliant example of modeling a real-world condition with a simple mathematical system, and of using what could have been a trivial aspect of the game (storing collected tokens) to create restrictions on gameplay that add to the realism of the simulation. I find beauty in clever mechanisms such as this. They are one of the main reasons I play these games.