Incan Gold Review

adminMay 08 2021

Incan Gold Review

Review: Incan Gold May 3, 2008 by originalsultan The Big Picture: Incan Gold is a light push-your-luck game with an Indiana Jones-esque theme that is suitable as a nice filler for serious gamers and as a mainstay for family gamers. Incan Gold (co-designed by Alan R. Moon, designer of Ticket to Ride) is a quick, fun game of bluff and daring in which explorers push their luck while exploring an old Incan temple in search of gold and treasure. In each round, you decide whether to delve deeper into the temple, adding to your riches, or escape with the share you've acquired so.

Incan Gold Review Youtube
Incan Gold Review

Stats:
No. of players: 3-8
Amount of time to play: 20 minutes
Age requirements: 6+
Set-up time: 3-5 min

Description:

Incan Gold is all about risk and reward. You are an adventurer exploring an Incan Temple for treasure. Will you continue on the path to collect more treasure or head back to your tent with the treasure you’ve already collected? This game is light, quick and easy to play. I have even taught my 6 year old nephew to play.
The game consists of five rounds. Each player has two cards, one shows you exploring and the other returning to your tent. At the beginning of the round everyone shows their card at once. If you decide to venture on a card is flipped and added next to the last card flipped. If the card shows a treasure value that value is divided evenly among all the players that decided to venture on. Treasure is placed in front of players’ tents and any remainder gets placed on the card. If a hazard is flipped over no treasure is collected by those who venture forth. There are five types of hazards (snakes, spiders, a mummy, fire and a collapse). Once the same hazard card has been flipped over twice all those who stayed in the temple must flee returning the treasure in front of their tents to the supply.

If you show your card that indicates you want to leave you may place any treasure in front of you inside your tent. You also pick up any treasure remaining on the path and place it inside your tent. If more than one person leaves at a time the treasure on the path is divided equally between them. Again any remainder stays on the path. Treasure inside your tent is kept secret so it may be hard to tell just how far ahead (or behind) others are.

Lastly there are 5 artifact cards. One is added to the deck each round. Artifacts can only be collected by a player who leaves the temple alone. The first three to appear in the game are worth five treasure and the last two are worth ten.

All card except for artifacts are reshuffled between rounds and after five rounds the player with the most treasure wins.

A Quick Review:
Incan Gold is another great game night starter, especially if you have a large group. It is light on strategy, but high on tension. There is a good bit of luck involved, but some number crunching can be done to help limit risk. It even helps if you know the people you are playing with. I always know when my wife and her siblings are going to leave as they have similar views on risk vs reward.