Fool’s Gold Game, act out the California Gold Rush

Last year before Christmas my Mom sent me a link with dozens of board games on sale, and said, “What do you want?”  Well, I looked through and found a handful of board games that looked interesting and we got ALL of them for Christmas.  Some have been a big hit, and others have been misses.  The Gold Rush game was a big hit.  Also, I liked that I could incorporate this into our recent gameschooling geography lesson for California.

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Quick historical background on the Gold Rush

The gold rush happened in the mid to late 1840s, gold was found in California in Sutter’s Mill.  Thousands flocked to find gold, many crossing the country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.  California went from being a backwater to making national news, and towns sprang up everywhere.  Most of the miners broke even or lost money because the sudden influx of people and cash drove prices sky high.  As time went on the gold petered out, but the people still came.

I’m sure you’re asking, why is this relevant?  Well, the Gold Rush game does a pretty good job of simulating how the gold rush works.

How the Gold Rush game works

Fool’s Gold is a worker placement game, so you place your characters according to what you think will get you the most gain that round. The Gold Rush game is played in 5 rounds, so you can learn from your previous rounds what worked and what didn’t.

Starting with the first player for that round you place one worker at a time at different mines.  The mines represent different places gold was found in California, and different mines have different amounts of gold in them. Some are easier to find gold, and some are harder.

Once everyone has placed their figures you draw cards for that location based on the number of people there.  The person with the highest number draws their cards first, and it continues down the line until everyone has gotten cards for that round, OR something happens in the mine.

Mining is not a safe job, sometimes you draw inclement weather, it could flood, an earthquake could happen, the mine could collapse, and all of those affect everyone in the mine.  You could end up with nothing because of bad events.

You can also end up with fools gold.  Miners were frequently fooled by fake gold, and would lose their claims when they went to sell the fake gold.  Of course there were also the charlatans selling fake gold.

There’s also just plain old dirt in the deck.  At the end of the round all of the bad stuff is put back in, the silt, the inclement weather, the fool’s gold.  I loved this because it did a great job of simulating how you got increasingly less and less gold as more people mined.

At the end of each year, you get more miners, and more money.  You need the money to pay for mining equipment, and you need the miners because the more miners at each location the more cards you get.

Strategies for the Gold Rush Game

1. At the end of the game, you tally up all the gold you got from different locations and throw out the location with the highest amount of gold, which was fool’s gold.  You want a diversity of locations and amounts.
2. Each location has a specific type of gem, those can add up for a lot of points, but multiple of the same gem does you no good.  As you’re mining keep an eye out for the gems you still need.
3. If there is nothing you like for the draw the first time you can opt to have your guy mine during the winter, that can be helpful, but you are usually running low odds because it is a set of 2 card draw.
4. Numbers is everything in this game.  Your person may have the highest location to pick first, but if another player has more diggers there, their miners all gang up together and say, “I’m sorry, but this is my dig, step back.”  So, you have to balance having the right placement of both time to pick AND numbers.  Which is part of the fun.  Sometimes it pays to have a less populated placement and then get better pick because there’s not as much competition.

Final call on Gold Rush game

This was one of our big wins from this Christmas.  It plays in less than an hour, which is nicely short for a strategy game, and it does a good simulation of a historical time, which can be hard to pull off.

Incorporating Fool’s Gold into your homeschool

As Future Ticia 2023 is updating this post I’m thinking of a couple of ways you can incorporate this into your homeschool:

• California Unit– incorporate it into learning about the state of California
• Westward Expansion– which apparently I’m titling Oregon Trail Unit, I kind of want to retitle that…
• Earth Science Unit-When you cover geology and different minerals