Last month, Jason Dinger did a giveaway on Twitter for a couple copies of Coal Baron: The Great Card Game, one of his favorite card games, and I won one of the copies! Thanks, Jason! How awesome is the board-game community! Prior to this giveaway, I had only vaguely heard of Coal Baron and didn’t even realize there was a card version of the original game. But man, this little card game really impressed me, and we’ve been having a great time playing it recently. Why aren’t more folks talking about this game? 

Coal Baron: The Great Card Game is 2-4 player game that plays in about 50-80 minutes. There’s no main board, just these long and narrow player boards that represent loading docks from which you collect lorries and build your trains. To begin, you sort the cards by types and place them face up on your table, with the lorry and wagon cards split into two piles each. But be warned, even though the game is essentially a bunch of cards, it does take up quite some space on your table.

The objective of the game is to efficiently collect lorries, build trains, complete orders and gain end-game scoring objectives. What I love most about this game is that it’s essentially a worker-placement game, in which your workers are represented by cards in your hand in various fix amounts. Each player has 10 worker cards: five 1s, two 2s, and one each of a 3, 4 and 5.

To activate a location, you spend a worker card and take the card at the top of the stack. If you or another player wants to activate that same location, you must spend exactly one more worker to do. For example, if a location already has been activated with one worker, then you must spend two workers to activate that location — either by using two 1 cards or a 2 card.

Having a fixed amount of worker cards where you must spend exactly one more worker results in a pretty crunchy game regarding action selection. Do you activate this location now, or can you a wait a turn and spend more workers to do so — and have the exact amount of worker cards in your hand? Or maybe you’ll get shut out because you can’t add exactly one more worker to the action space. It’s such a tight balance of timing and hand management!

So what are the cards you can grab? You want to collect lorries, which will sit in a single row to the left of your player board. The order is important because you can only load the right-most lorries into your wagons. Wagon cards have symbols that can only sit to the right of your player board in the row that matches that symbol. Additionally, lorries have symbols on their cards, too, and can only be loaded into a matching wagons. Lastly, you collect one engine per row, and the row loads or expands until you make a delivery.

But before you make a delivery, which is an action spot in itself, you need to collect order cards. Order cards show where you’re delivering the goods and how many lorries are required before the order is complete. You collect the majority of your victory points through order cards and the VPs on most lorry cards.

There are also innovation cards, which give you extra actions or workers. Lastly, there are share and objective cards, which work toward end-game scoring. In addition to the loading and delivery actions, there is a wild action card that allows you to look at the top four cards of any deck and keep one of them and placing the other three at the bottom of the pile. We call this the Scouting Action, a la Battlestar Galactica.

Players spend workers to take an action, and then pass if they have no more workers or are unable to spend the correct amount of workers to activate a location. After everyone passes, the shift ends, and the last player to activate a specific loading action takes an action-shift token, which is 1 VP each at the end of the game.

Depending on the number of players, the game continues for five, six or seven shifts. After the shifts are depleted, it’s the end of the game and players calculate their VPs and end-game scoring. Share cards are assigned to exactly one order that matches the location symbol on the card. The person with the most VPs wins the game. In the case of a tie, the person who received the last shift token wins the game.

I can’t say enough about how wonderful this card game is! I really enjoy the fact that it’s a true worker-placement game, but with workers as cards in your hand, which is a mechanism I don’t think I’ve specifically encountered before. Who else has played this game before?