At the tail end of August I was saying how fortunate I had been to be able to make it to Beyond Monopoly! —our local boardgames club here in York— and I’m pleased to say a couple of fortuitous circumstances meant I could make it again this Saturday just gone… not least because I still cannot work at the moment (with a comparable drop in income, alas), and it currently feels like the only decent opportunity I’m getting to actually drag myself out of the house for a large chunk of the day.

Anyway, among the games played this weekend (which included Wingspan Pocket, RA and Write, Go Big! and Cabanga!), I got the chance to get both Gold Country (2026) and Coffee Rush: Winter (2026) to the table for the first time, so here are my first impressions of both…

Gold Country (2026)

I am hoping to post a more extensive Unboxing… blog entry of this on here in the next few days, but since I managed to get it played just a few days ago —and while it’s fresh in my head— it makes sense to share my thoughts about it here… It’s also worth adding I ordered various deluxe components for my copy of Gold Country (which I backed on Kickstarter btw with my own coin), so some of the bits shown here will differ slightly to the standard version — actually in these photos only the chunky plastic tiles will be different to those in the base game, so scratch that!🤦‍♀️

So… in Gold Country you’re looking to buy and sell shares in various gold mines in an effort to earn more money than everyone else by the end of the game. You will start the game with one share in each, as well as an additional secret mystery share that will remain yours throughout the game, “until the bitter end” as the saying goes. All the gold mines will start the game with a share price / cost of 5 gold coins.

The value of shares will change throughout the game, because every turn each player will be adding at least three wooden claim tokens to the board (they are little coloured tents that will spread out from each mine, changing the value of those shares according to the various plus and minus tiles they pass through as they do). As well as tiles that adjust the value of shares for better or worse, there are Nugget tiles that will pay out 2 coins per share for the owners of shares in that mine, and Cave-in tiles that will take money from players just as quickly (2 coins per share).

There are also Gem tiles that will just add 5 coins to your final monies, Boat tiles that will enable you to cross a river, and Dynamite tiles that will allow you to place two more claim tokens. The Boat, Gem and Dynamite tiles are only used with the flipside of the board which has a slightly different set-up, several tunnel spaces, and a winding river running from one side of the board to the other, and since we only played the base game these tiles were not used.

Gameplay is such that on your turn you’ll place your claim tokens / tents, make up to 2 buy or sell transactions, and / or pay 3 gold coins to activate one of the Action cards. Key to the game, however, is that you can do these actions in any order, but have to fully complete the action before starting a different one.

Straight away you can probably identify where the usual Knizia mix of delicious decision-making comes to the fore… Do you plummet the value of shares and then buy them whilst hoping they’ll climb back up again, or sell them while they’re high and then plunge their value for other players, or perhaps buy some cheap shares, increase their value, and hope they stay relatively high by the time your next turn comes round? Other than the gold-veined tiles, the rest are placed randomly upon set-up, so every game is going to be different and no doubt some mines will look more attractive than others at the start of the game…

The Action cards along the side of the board are one-use only, so when they’re paid for and snapped up no-one else will get to do them — this does add both timing and tension to the game, with Action cards offering additional claim tokens to place, an additional buy / sell action, or even the chance to ditch the coloured claim tokens / tents you have for brand new ones — these are always drawn fresh from the bag at the end of your turn and kept hidden behind your screen!

It’s worth adding there are black ‘bandit’ claim tokens added to the claim bag as the gold-veined tiles get removed from the board, and these allow players to extend mines without the benefit or downside of the relevant tile(s) they cover, which adds another element of strategy (and chance) to the game…

I’d have to say that even though I didn’t do that well in this, I certainly enjoyed the experience, and there are several nice touches which ensure nothing is guaranteed. The simple rules make for an easy teach, but there’s plenty of decision-making challenges along the way because players are influencing the value of shares throughout. The jury’s still out on whether specialisation really wins the day because there was little between the winner and runner-up, despite one holding a much more diverse portfolio than the other. Regardless, I’m looking forward to playing this a lot more over the coming months!

Coffee Rush: Winter (2026)

I posted an unboxing of Coffee Rush: Winter earlier this month —you can access that here: Coffee Rush: Winter (2026)… Unboxing!— and wrote back then that this is a gorgeous game to photograph, mainly because of all the marvellous little plastic ingredients and components inside the box. Alas, this game proved so engrossing and fast-paced I literally forgot to take any photos other than the single one on this page, for which I can only apologise — I’ll try to add more with subsequent plays!

As you can probably tell from the above, this game is deceptively charming and full of tension — the set-up takes minutes, the gameplay is nice and easy, but things ramp up very quickly indeed — which saw me drowning knee-deep in customer orders even before I got my first turn of the game!

In Coffee Rush: Winter you’re trying to complete and satisfy coffee orders for a growing number of customers, most of which haven’t got time to hang about (4 turns to be precise). Every order requires at least 3 and sometimes 4 different ingredients, and at the start of the game you’ll have just one ingredient and will have to move through the board to collect 3 more on your turn. If you’re lucky, you might get one order out of the way on your first turn, but more importantly, whenever you do complete an order throughout the game, the next two players around the table will each get additional orders — if you complete two orders, they each get two more orders, etc. so it doesn’t take a genius to work out how quickly this can spiral out of control, and boy did that happen, on multiple occasions… Thankfully, you cannot complete more than 3 orders in a turn, but that’s little comfort in this frenetic game of mind-melting masochism!

Well how the hell do you get on top of things then? Well, therein lies the problem… you just don’t — you spend every turn scampering around hoping to complete and prioritise your own orders while praying that other players can’t complete theirs! Coffee Rush: Winter is basically a race against time that you ain’t winning, and it is as brutal as it is pretty…!

That all said, there are ways to enhance your ingredient-collecting abilities, but you need to cash in the orders you’ve completed to do so, which won’t be happening before your 3rd or 4th turn, at which point everyone else’s kitchen board is just as crazy busy as your own. The cries of anguish and despair with every turn could be heard into the next room as the orders just kept piling up and there came a fast realisation that this ain’t going to be no walk-in-the-park, or rather… there weren’t going to be any ‘let’s sit down for a nice coffee’ moments, that’s for sure.

I’m still not entirely sure why this masochistic mayhem proved so much fun, but nobody around the table was disappointed and everyone marvelled at the lovely tactile components — I think there was a tangible sigh of relief when things finally came to an end (it took about 30 minutes or so) with one player having allowed 5 orders to drop off the end of the queue, but to be honest, guv’nor, I wasn’t exactly paying proper attention at the time!

All told, ’twas good fun, a great first play, and needless to say I’m looking forward to having another go hopefully sometime soon!

— Alex Bardy, 08Sept26