Mayfair Games Oh My Goods! Board Game, German Edition

It really is a terrible name for an enjoyable medieval-ish resource production and building construction card game in a tiny, tiny box, with quite a lot of depth for its size. It’s one of those games where each card has multiple functions, depending on context. You start with a hand of 5 cards from the deck, a “worker” card, and a card showing a charcoal producer, which is your first building and which you place in front of you – when cards are face up on the table in front of you, they’re buildings. On the upper half of this charcoal producer, you place (unseen, and sideways) 7 face down cards from the deck - when cards are face down on a building, they’re goods.Each turn a number of cards will be drawn from the deck, and laid in the middle of the table - when cards are in the middle of the table like this, they are the “Market”, and represent resources: each card has a little resource icon on the left (wood/raw cloth/grain etc.) that shows you what it is. You then all simultaneously choose which of your buildings will produce this turn (though you’ll only have the one to start) and place your worker card underneath it. Your worker’s orientation will indicate whether you’re producing “sloppily” or “effectively” – more on that later. To trigger that building to produce, though, you need certain resources to be available in the Market, and these are shown on the building you want to produce with, in the lower half. You don’t take the resources from the Market, they just have to be there, and everyone can “use” the same resources. You also now choose whether to play a face down card, which will be “built” as a building later on, if you can afford it. Next, a second group of cards is added to the Market to add to the resources available there, and once that’s done players in turn try to produce and build. If the building you’ve chosen requires resources that haven’t turned up in the Market, you have to make up the shortfall by discarding cards from your hand that show the needed resource(s). If you can’t do that, your chosen building won’t produce. If it does produce, though, you take one or two cards from the deck and place them face down as goods on the building. If you produced “sloppily”, you only take one card, but you need one less resource than shown on the building to trigger production. If you produced “effectively”, you need all the resources, either from the table or from your hand. If you caused a building to produce, you can also use the “production chain” of the building to convert resources from one kind to another – another little set of icons on the card shows you what you need (sometimes one good, sometimes two) to convert the goods shown to the kind of goods the building produces. The goods you convert can come from other buildings you have previously produced and stored them on, or from your hand (in which case the resource icon on the card must be of the appropriate kind).Then, you can use goods you’ve produced (now or previously) to construct the building shown on the card you placed face down. The cost is in coins, and each of your goods cards is worth a certain number of coins depending on the building it’s sitting on – charcoal is worth 1 coin per card, bricks are worth 2, cows are worth 3, shoes are worth 8, and so on). So, to build a butcher costs you 12 coins, and you could make up that from, say, a pair of shoes, a cow and a charcoal…you get the picture.There’s also assistants, who can be bought for coins instead of a building, but only if you have the right combination of buildings already in front of you. They are used like a worker, and you can have up to two of them, so you could end up triggering three buildings to produce in a turn, if you’re very lucky.You do all this until someone builds their 8th building, have one more round (during which production chains can be used without buildings needing to have produced), then swap coins for VPs at a 5:1 ratio, add up the VPs on your buildings and assistants, and see who has the most.The multifunction nature of the cards meant it took me a while to get my head around this one – several times I used cards from my hand I had intended to use as buildings later, in order to pay a resource to produce at a building so I could get coins to build the building I had just used..yeah, that's not going to work, is it? <sigh> Top tip: don’t do stuff like that if you plan on having any chance of winning! Like another card game from the same designer, Port Royal, there’s a bit of luck in the Market display, but not so much it feels unbalanced to me. Overall, I was very pleased with the depth, and how the game flowed. Almost zero player interaction, though, so if you must have that kind of thing you might not enjoy this, but it does make it a rather gentle and dignified 30 minutes or so of entertainment that I’d gladly experience again.

A nice card game about building up resources and purchasing buildings.The goal is to generate resources to build new buildings, that give you victory points.Upon reaching 8 buildings (including your starting one) the game ends.The key to victory is to build up lots of additional resources, if possible, and buy the more expensive buildings that will give more points. Excess resources can actually make the difference between a win and a loss, so managing that is important too.I really enjoy playing this game, it's very portable and fairly simple to learn and teach but will get you to play more than a few times in a single sitting.You'll almost certainly want to try again after your first try.Quality is decent enough and the artwork is fun, includes both English and German on the cards. What is really great is how the cards act as buildings, market resources and production resources. While this isn't unknown to happen, it works extremely well for this game.

Fantastic game for the money. You buy buildings and try to get a production chain going, where you feed the goods produced by some buildings into other buildings that then produce more advanced, more valuable goods. You feel like you barely have time to get your chain up and running. It packs a decent amount of game into 30 minutes. Check online that you are playing the updated rules, as the original rules made it arguably too hard to get your production chain up and running. My only concern would be if you have not played "gateway gamers games" like Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne, it might be a bit tricky to get into. If that is you, I would suggest try Port Royal first, by the same author, which is a little simpler, very fun, and learn how to play that by watching videos on youtube of how to play. Much easier to learn by watching a video than wading through dry rules.

Great immursive game! It was a little complex to understand the rules inituallyas there is alot of information on the cards. There are a plethora of youtube videos explaining the cards and shows a gae in process, so understanding the process of chain production and how to use the resources.I loved this, and have been playing it daily. My partner,(who usually does not play many games) also got into it and always want to play! This is a resource production game, similar to the Settlers video game series.Quite a lot of tabletop space is needed to layout the cards as there are usually quite a few on the table at once. It mightb e able to be played with on the go but we did not try this as i would think unless you are in first class you might not have enough space to play it.One change i made was to use poker chips for the resources on each building to keep the desk space down as it can get a bit cluttered with all the cards.Overall, i would recommend if you like the genre.

I played a copy of this little card game at my local game group, Preston Gamers Guild and was amazed at how much gameplay and depth of decision making there was in such a little deck of cards. Oh My Goods is a solid, pocket sized Euro game about resource management and engine building by Alexander Pfister, creator of the also fantastic Euro game Mombasa.Rules are simple and easy to follow and 2-4 players will find a good hour + game with many meaningful decisions and choices of what buildings to construct to get the best resource generating engine going to build better buildings and buy more workers. The first to build 8 buildings wins.The first expansion, Lonsdale in Revolt also adds a story mode and full solitaire rules which really lifts the game and makes it an ideal game to stick in your pocket to play wherever you are.