Episode 220: Golem

Golem is designed by Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, & Simone Luciani Art by Francesco Ciampi, Roberto Grasso and published by Cranio Creations. Golem can be played 1-4 players in 90-120 minutes.

In Golem you are taking the role of a scholar focused on creating and managing the clay autonomas, Golems. Golem is played over four rounds in which players can do a lot of things. Like a lot, I don’t even know how to do this rules gist. Best bet is to go watch a playthrough honestly. I’ll do my best here. Players are advancing their knowledge by reading books and learning spells, building their Golems, and creating artifacts. Advancing in these areas will gain players multipliers based on how well they do in those areas to gain points at the end of the game. You get a total of ONLY twelve turns where you are drafting different colored marbles out of the synagogue which dictate which one of the 5 different actions you can take: work, golem, artifact, spells, and mirror) the color of the marble tells the player which student moves ahead on which street. Other than picking two marbles, players can  place their rabbi on an action tile (which vary round to round and also determines the turn order for the next round). As mentioned some actions will cause players, students and golems to move down the streets through three different districts. You want to advance as far as possible since the further you go the better the actions tiles are. Be careful though, because if your Golems are further ahead than your students,  you have to pay knowledge tokens and if you don’t have those; points. Needless to say you will be killing and burying your Golems in this game (that’s okay b/c you get resources when you do). Each player will also have end game objective cards that will give points based on the achieved objective and then additional points for having completed sets of these objective cards.  In short you do actions that give you resources that are in turn used to advance in the different areas to enhance scoring at the end of the game. So let’s head back to the studio to determine if the hosts are real humans or just clay autonomas.