When I first heard the title of CGE's game I misheard it as kennahara, a yiddish expression that literally translates as 'no evil eye' (kein eina hara); the equivalent of saying 'God forbid'. I hadn't at that point come across the Czech city of Kutná Hora. It's a relatively small town now but in the Middle Ages it was a thriving economic hub that rivalled Prague. Its prosperity was centred around its silver mines, and these, and the development of the town are the theme underpinning the Kutná Hora game, or to give it its full title: Kutná Hora: The City of Silver.
Designed by Ondrej Bystron, Petr Cáslava and Pavel Jarosch, Kutná Hora is a city-building and economic euro game where the 2-4 players are, each round, selecting five actions from the cards in their hand. Ultimately, you want to generate victory points but to do that you'll need to develop buildings that will give you resources that you can cash in to give you the money you'll need to support most actions in the game. At the start of the game, each player will have membership of three 'guilds' and you'll only be able to acquire and own buildings that are affiliated to your guilds, so several of the building tiles that will crop up in the market will be unavailable to you. This immediately kicks off the game with an intriguing asymmetry. There's also an initial but important judgement call to make about which row on your player board you place each of your three guild tokens. Whenever you build a guild building on the main board, you mark its ownership by taking a house from that row of your player board and the houses in each row give you a different benefit...
Building in Kutná Hora isn't just a matter of acquiring a tile and placing it on the board: taking the tile is a Rights action and the cost will depend on where a building tile is in the market row. You also have to have taken a Plot action to buy and mark a plot on the board. It's a third (Building) action to actually place your building tile on your plot on the board. For that you must pay the cost in wood, and only at this point will you gain the benefits shown on the tile. These primarily let you advance your marker on one or more resource tracks on your player board. You get income corresponding to the current market value of all your resources showing on your player board when you take the Income action. You can also take a mining action which involves drawing a mining tile and placing it out at the mine entrances or orthogonally adjacent to tiles already in the mine. These tiles will usually give you resource benefits but you'll also hope to collect tiles with stars on them because game-end scoring gives area control bonuses for majorities across each of the mine's four levels. Finally, there a Cathedral to build, with each stage giving often very valuable bonus actions, but you'll need to use a pelican token to support the action - these are awarded with some of the buildings.
At the heart of the game is the dynamic market in resources. It genuinely responds to supply and demand. When a building is added to the central board, that building's output increases supply and so is likely to reduce the price of that resource. However, buildings also add to the town's appeal, so the population increases, which is likely to increase demand. It's a very fluid market, so you'll ideally want to time your actions so Building actions aren't too expensive but Income actions net you a worthwhile amount of cash to spend on subsequent turns. You never actually hold any resources (there are no tokens for the wood, beer or meat produced by the guilds) but when you take the Income action you are paid the value for each resource multiplied by the number for that resource on your player board. Likewise when you pay the cost in wood to place out a building, you pay the current value of wood multiplied by the amount of wood shown on your card. It means players are called on to do some simple in-game maths but it makes for an efficient game economy.
Aside from the economic aspect of the game, players need to be conscious of adjacency for their plots, buildings and mines. The cost of a Plot or Mine action is determined in relation to the numbers on adjacent tiles: you must always pay the highest of all the adjacent values.
Adjacency also counts heavily for scoring. In addition to your guild buildings, you can also draft and build public buildings. These tend to have a relatively high wood cost and you don't own them (so you don't get to place one of your houses on them) but they do give the builder benefits at the time of Building and, crucially, their adjacency can substantially boost your owned buildings' end-game scores. Several of the public buildings also generate 'Patricians' which you can pay to trigger specific scoring bonuses, tho' that's at a cost and, once triggered, they will also benefit other players who meet the particular scoring criteria.
There's a lot going on Kutná Hora and, with so many moving parts, your first play can seem daunting. The actions and individual mechanics are all straightforward enough but it can be hard at first to visualise how they all synergise. Naive first players may think it wise to snap up inexpensive building plots but it can certainly be worth paying the seemingly high cost of some building plots if you can use them to boost your end-game score. You need to plan ahead for your Rights, Plot, Building actions, and to be sure you have the Income to cover your costs. Each round you're also likely to have to pay tax, and if you can't or choose not to pay, you lose Reputation (another track on your player board). This is a game where you are almost always choosing between desirable options but if you find you don't quite have enough cash to meet the tax bill in the final round, the loss of Reputation and consequent reduction in points can make all the difference between winning and losing.
At Board's Eye View, we've been impressed with how quickly this game plays. There's almost no down time and, even with four players, you can realistically expect to finish a game (five rounds; six rounds with two or three players) in a little over an hour. You don't score at the end for holding cash; just make sure you have held back enough to cover that pesky tax demand, kennahara.
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
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