‘Kutná Hora: The City of Silver’ Board Game Review
If you’re a regular reader of the board game section on Nerdly, you’ll probably know that I love games that tell stories. This isn’t just about the theme and setting of a game, but also the way in which its mechanics come together to support the visual and thematic elements. In Kutná Hora: The City of Silver, players will settle, build and expand the titular city (which was famous in 14th century Bohemia) by mining, mapping the city and contributing to the construction of the famous Santa Barbara Cathedral – and I can tell you now, the theme fits the mechanics absolutely perfectly.
The game begins with a couple of boards that will be completely empty – one of these represents the silver-rich underground that ultimately drew so many people to the valley in which Kutná Hora was founded. The other board features the city itself. There is also a third board which includes the building market and round tracker – with the five different kinds of buildings setup in a partially randomised way with a few specific buildings placed in a certain way. In addition to these boards, there are two card holders that feature a deck of cards and two or three notched tracks respectively – these track the in-game economy and I’ll talk (lots) about them later.
Each player then receives a player board with four income tracks, three guild tracks, a reputation track, a load of miner meeples and twelve houses that notch nicely into slots on the dual-layer boards. These boards and pieces are absolutely gorgeous, and in fact throughout the whole game, I have to say that Kutná Hora features absolutely top-notch production. Players also get some money to begin the game with then a deck of cards that each feature two actions – one on the top half and one on the bottom. There will also be a few other elements of setup such as setting aside a few tiles and tokens (pelican tokens, mining technology levels and mine tiles) and the Santa Barbara Cathedral tiles.
With the setup done, Kutná Hora can begin. On their turn, each player will simply take one or two actions by playing cards in front of them. Actions include Rights, Income, Plotting, Building, Mining and Santa Barbera, as well as a Joker action that can be used to replace any other action at the cost of one reputation. I don’t want to explain all of these actions in detail, but I will talk through a few of them once I’ve explained some more of the principles of the game. The main thing to note here is that for the first two turns in a round each player will take two actions before passing, and then in the third and final turn of a round, each player will take just one action.
Before I explain anything else, I should mention those market decks. The first of these contains a black and silver bar representing the precious ores that can be mined in Kutná Hora, whilst the second contains three tracks which measure the value of wood, food and beer. As different things happen in the city (such as new buildings being added or population growth) players will potentially move the sliders in these card holders to the right, or flip over new cards from the deck below. As an example, if someone builds a wood building, the wood slider will move to the right – and this reduces the cost of wood to indicate that the amount of wood available has increased. When a card flips over, it often results in population increase, which drives demand, and often the price of all commodities will increase.
The market is important for many reasons, but the main two are perhaps linked to income and expenditure. Players in Kutná Hora never “hold” resources like wood or iron – they simply spend money to access these resources based on the current market prices, or when taking income, they earn money based on the same. There’s clearly an optimisation puzzle here that makes Kutná Hora pretty fascinating. It might seem obvious to try and build when wood is cheap and take income when the market is strong, but you never know what your opponents are going to do and with just twenty-five actions over five rounds, you will often need (or at least want) to affect the board at your own pace.
Bringing this information into the actions, I’ll give you a few worked scenarios so that you get a feel for the game. Firstly, let’s talk about the guilds – there are five of these in the game and you’ll only have access to three of them. To remind you of this, three guild crests will be slotted into your player board and each one will line up with a row of houses that you’ll place onto the main board when you build something associated with that guild. For example, if you are in the Builders, Scribers and Innkeepers Guilds, then building a Tavern (which is associated with the Innkeepers Guild) will mean you take a building from that row on your player board. During setup, there is some guidance around drafting these guilds to ensure a balanced game, but in actual fact I just use the pre-configured options for each player count which achieves the same outcome.
To build that Tavern, you’d first need to take the Plot action (which is where you choose a space on the board and effectively pay the land tax to build there), and then you’d need to take the Rights action to claim the building from the public market (again, paying the tax for the right to do so.) Finally, you’ll take the Build action (spending money based on the current wood price multiplied by the number of wood needed) to build. When you do this, you put the building on the board, take the benefit shown on it, affect the market accordingly, move your income on your player board and take the benefit which was uncovered when you took the house off your board. Yes, that’s a lot – but now you see why it’s worth spending three actions over at least two turns to build.
The key thing to note here is that as you build structures relating to your three guilds, your income associated with the resource that the guild controls will increase – and when you take the Income action, you’ll get money equal to your income on each track, multiplied by your income value for each guild on your player board. As the game progresses this can get into big numbers easily into seventies or eighties, and indeed the game recognises this by making your income divided by ten into end game points. The other actions that I didn’t cover include both Mining – which is quite different to building in that it doesn’t require plotting or rights, but it does need miners and permits, and how you build relates to the mines that already exist on the board – and Santa Barbera. This latter action requires a pelican token and allows the player to spend that token to flip the next Santa Barbera token and take the associated benefits (which can be powerful.)
All of this stuff is actually fairly straightforward to do and it makes sense when you play it. The flow of getting a building on the board simply makes sense – so does how the market works and how you take income. Because this is all so logical, Kutná Hora is pretty easy to teach at a purely mechanical level. However, none of this would be especially interesting if it were not for some of the scoring. There are several areas that score, including from mines, from buildings and how they are placed, from patricians who come in several colours and score different things and then from reputation, income and pairs of pelican tokens. Let’s talk about a few of these areas.
With respect to mining, each level of the mine will be scored, with the number of stars that have been generated (based on how players chose to place mines) generating a maximum score each row, and then the number of stars that each player controls in that level determining who scores the most points (and then how other players score in descending order.) On the town board, buildings score for being placed adjacent to buildings that have synergy – and this is represented by icons in the top corner of the building board. Critically, most guild buildings will have one or at most two symbols, but the special public buildings (which the players must build, but which are controlled by no one) can often have three icons on – meaning that you want to position them close to your matching buildings, whilst ideally preventing your opponents from taking too much benefit.
There’s a lot more to scoring that I haven’t covered here – like the Patricians who may score used pelican tokens at the end of each round, or for every column of houses (one of each guild) that you’ve removed from your player board. Heck, I haven’t even said how Patricians enter the game (which is when their symbol appears on a building usually) or how they become “active” (which is when someone taking income decides to pay them ten coins) but hopefully you get the idea. The game itself is simple to learn and teach, the scoring nuances and how to play Kutná Hora well are probably going to be emerging for a couple of years, such as the level of interaction possible in this game and the way that various combinations of effects may or may not occur.
Getting to the point, I don’t think there is anything about Kutná Hora that I don’t like. It looks fantastic with some excellent components and fantastic colours, it feels great because the houses and pieces are made of “re-wood” which is some kind of recycled mulch that can then be moulded into almost miniature quality shapes and it is just absolutely fantastic to play. Over the course of every game, you will see a medieval city be built and come to life. You’ll feel the way the economy ebbs and flows as the population increases and the job market expands and then contracts again. You will feel a sense of fulfilment from most of your turns – there’s always progress towards something, and choosing the best plots or mines gets increasingly intense as the game emerges. Kutná Hora is just a solid, solid game that asks relatively little and offers a lot in return – I recommend it highly.
