Goblin Vaults review— It’s a clever little goblin

I’m bored to tears of playing essentially the same game over and over again. It’s easy to point the finger at Euros here, but it’s just as, if not more, prevalent in American designs; are you really gonna tell me that the base games of Firefly and Outer Rim are that different? Board gaming is in desperate need of more weird stuff, but strangeness still needs to be mixed with familiarity in order to keep learning from being such a hassle that no one wants to bother. When a design hits the right ratio, it can still sometimes feel like taking a group of picky eaters out to your favorite hole in the wall that they’re already calling “too adventurous” when they see they can’t order nuggies and fries, but when I put the right game in front of the right players it’s like playing my first worker placement. Goblin Vaults hit that sweet spot for me.

The core gameplay of Goblin Vaults is an intriguing hybrid of trick-taking and auction mechanics. Starting with the first player, everyone plays a card from their hand to bid on one of three lots. If you ever play lower than the current high bid on a lot, you’re underbidding, and have to pay a gear to the high bid card. There’s no following suit here, suits don’t matter in bidding outside of the warden suit, this game’s version of trump suits. Playing warden suits will just default beat any non-warden bid, similar to any trump suit, but it also allows one of two warden actions: either discard a card to the bottom of the deck to draw a card, or move a card to an empty space in your titular vault. More on that later.Once everybody’s played their bids, the round ends. Players with winning bids place the lot into their vault, the winning bid becoming a lot for the next round. Players with losing bids place their bids into their vault, which I love because it incentivises paying attention to other people’s games to find a lot they’ll really want so you can get your high-value cards from your hand into your vault. After everyone’s taken their prizes, the first player has the option of exchanging the warden card with one of the lots if they so please, then they pass the token to the left and start a new round.

Players’ vaults are their personal 4×3 scoring areas that they’ll be filling each column top to bottom over the course of the game’s nine rounds. Each game will have its unique combination of scoring cards, but there are some universal conditions that will remain in every game: cards want to be in either the top, middle, or bottom row of a vault, and will score one, two, or three points respectively if they wind up in their proper homes. Additionally, every card has a faction marker that will correspond to a player color, worth two points in the proper vault.

Goblin Vaults is an uncanny valley of board gaming, but in a good way. iIt’s innovative in a way that makes it an entirely unique game, but players familiar with the core concepts of trick taking, auctions, and pattern scoring have instincts to rely on, freeing up their brain space for making clever plays. It would be a masterpiece, but I’ve got a couple bones to pick. Easily my biggest issue is the choice of a fantasy theme; when you combine how paper-thin the theming is with how approachable the game is mechanically, something with a broader appeal like assembling cupcake towers would’ve made this so much easier to table with a group of people that didn’t binge Rings of Power. There’s also my personal bugbear of a box that’s roughly four times as big as it needs to be. I also pretty exclusively play this at 4, so I just have a suit set out aside from the deck, but you do have to add/remove suits for player count, which I absolutely loathe doing in card games. All in all, those are extremely minor nitpicks considering how great I found Goblin Vaults to be, but knowledge is power.

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