Episode 174: Nevada City

Nevada City is a 2 to 4 player worker placement title designed by Alan D. Ernstein, with art by Claus Stephan and Antje Stephan, and published in 2020 by Rio Grande Games. In Nevada City, players take on the role of Old West families competing to contribute to the local city by constructing buildings and completing contracts. Over the course of the game, players will have the chance to grow their families through marriage, expand their ranch to develop more resources, fight off troublemakers, and more.

Each player starts with a family of four, each of whom will come with a number of worker pieces – the number distribution of these pieces from family member to family member varies across the four families. Each family member also has one or more skills that can be used when constructing buildings and completing contracts to replace needed resources.

In addition to their starting family, each player will become the owner of a random building, and will secretly choose one of two different objective cards that will contribute to a common pile.

Each round – which consists of every player taking one turn – will start with an event card, which will apply some positive or negative effect for the rest of the round

Then, on a player’s turn, they will select one family member and use all the worker pieces on that person to take actions in their ranch and within the city. On their ranch, a worker may be placed to generate resources, the exact number of which is determined by the kinds of fields on the player owns as well as a market that will fluctuate from round to round and sometimes over the course of a round. Workers may also be placed in the city to begin construction of a new building, complete a contract – which generally means contributing coins and/or resources to some objective – or take actions at already-constructed building. Every action has a coin cost, and that cost is always paid to the owner of the building. Buildings have a variety of powers and abilities and provide more robust benefits as the game progresses; suffice it to say, constructing buildings is the core action of the game, a major point generator, and critical for future income.

One of the key actions available is hiring workers from a market that is refreshed each turn. Workers bring additional worker pieces and skills immediately into the player’s family to be used that turn.

When all players have exhausted all their family members, the phase is over. At this time, players will have the option of paying some resources to marry their son and/or daughter character off to one of the workers hired this round. Once married, a character will never get a chance to remarry, so – as in life! – choose your mate carefully. This worker now becomes a permanent part of the family for all future rounds.

There are a few variants that can be included in the game, including some buildings that add gambling options, as well as Troublemakers, which caused unhired workers to get rowdy and shoot the town up at the end of the phase, requiring players to send a gunslinger from their family to fend them off. These are optional, and we’ll discuss the specifics of some of these during the review.

The game continues like this until the event deck is exhausted or all the building spaces in the city are full. Players then finish the phase, including any end-of-phase scoring, score the objectives selected at the start of the game, and determine the winner.

01:24:17 – Review

01:49:02 – Ratings

ReRoll

01:59:44 – Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth [Buy] – Fantasy Flight Games; Designer: Nathan I. Hajek, Grace Holdinghaus;

Check out our original review during Episode 148.

Gameplay Photos

* Disclosure: These titles were received free of charge by the publishers or distributors. If you are interested in submitting a title for review, please read our Review Policy.

Show Notes

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Featured Review: Nevada City

ReRoll

Gameplay Photos

Episode 303: Tag Team

Episode 302: Shackleton Base

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