Kutna Hora

The game's full title is Kutná Hora: The City of Silver and it's all about mining silver and expanding the eponymous central European city. It is a wonderfully complex game, with several central boards (the mines, the city…), a board for each player and tiles to make up the city’s cathedral.

So, players are mining ore, adding buildings (which actually takes three specific actions), taking income (production at current prices) or building part of St Barbara’s. They take each action by playing one of their cards that shows the action. However, the cards are double-ended, so using one action means they can't take the other action on that card this round. Careful planning required!

My favourite mechanism in the game is the gadgets used to change resources' prices in line with supply and demand. Thus, as players dig out more ore, the price goes down – but more people are attracted to the mines. This increases demand and pushes prices up. Clever stuff – though there is an app you can use instead, if you're that way inclined.

There's a lot more going on in this game and I'm really enjoying learning how to take advantage of it all.

For 2-4 players, aged 13+, playing time 1-2 hours

Kutna Hora was designed by Ondrej Bystron, Petr Cáslava and Pavel Jarosch and is published by Czech Games Edition

Find out more:
    Kutna Hora on BoardGameGeek
    Pevans's introduction to Kutna Hora in To Win Just Once issue 245 (PDF, 1 Mb)