Oh My Goods!

Oh My Goods! is an honest little old-school production game, the sort that makes you inspect the box and wonder how it has fitted so much game into it. Set collection, push-your-luck and engine building sit together neatly, with an explanation light enough for a mixed table.

Each player builds a chain of buildings, turning resources into increasingly useful production. Every round asks you to marry the shared resource pool to the cards in hand; the interesting decision is how far to commit to the visible supply and how much cover to keep for the production plan that refuses to cooperate.

Interaction is mostly indirect. Everyone works from the same pool, and everyone is racing to build the structures that will improve their own engine. It creates a tidy development race without adding exceptions for their own sake, or confrontation the design does not need.

The base game does lose a little force at the finish. By the fifth or sixth building, it is often apparent who has taken a lead into the home stretch, and the final round can feel like administration rather than suspense. I prefer it to Town Builder:Coveorden, which occupies similar ground, but Expedition to Newdale is plainly the more complete version of this idea when there is time for it.

Updated session

A later play showed how useful that simple framework is with a young child: it teaches cleanly, it is not overly competitive, and once the central idea lands, making things starts to feel properly satisfying. For adults, though, it now feels rather meh to me; the admiration for its small-box efficiency remains, but it is not enough to make it a frequent pick.