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Taken from Boardgame News:
Oregon is a family/strategy game with a colonization-theme and a card-driven placement mechanism. The aim of the game is to position farmers and point-giving buildings in the best possible locations on the board.
The year is 1846. Gunslingers, lawmen, pioneers, and whole families left their homes in the east and midwest to try their luck in the West. They loaded their covered wagons with all they could and headed west across steppes, deserts, and mountains. Many chose to settle in Oregon, where the farming and hunting were plentiful, and they could stake out a bit of land for themselves. The players have already reached Oregon and gaze upon the rich farmland below and the potential gold and coal reserves of the mountains. They build ports on the lakes and rivers, churches, warehouses, post offices, and train stations on the plains. And, of course, they must farm the rich land to grow the food necessary for the area to grow and thrive. To win, a player must choose the right times to farm and the right times to build, for planning is necessary, even here in the untamed wilderness of Oregon! Oregon - the way the west was won...
- Strong designer pedigree (William Ayia of Kais)
- Interesting blend of worker placement and auction mechanics
- Adventure/story-driven flavor with quests
- Publication details are unclear or not fully disclosed
- Limited publicly available information on publisher and release timing
- adventure, exploration, questing
- Fantasy/adventure world with quests
- story-driven with adventure and quests
- Spyium
- Kais
- Botswana
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Dutch priority auction — An auction for multiple lots where prices are determined by the number of bids on each lot.
- worker placement — Players place workers to take actions; when a worker is pulled back, resources, companions, or items are claimed.
- worker placement (with pull-back action) — Players place workers to take actions; when a worker is pulled back, resources, companions, or items are claimed.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I want to see better board game boards.
- the trend I'd like to see stop is laziness and cutting corners.
- crowdfunding used as a marketing tool.
- I personally want to own more of my stuff and not have to worry about being beholden to something being shut down.
- board games are this like persistent nostalgic thing that have always existed that you can't really you can digitize them and make these digital versions but we haven't seen them explode.
- it's the FOMO hub of our hobby.
References (from this video)
- Deep, multi-layered strategy with bidding and tower optimization.
- Varied interaction through market card bidding, creating tension each turn.
- Interesting rule interactions (zeros, eights) that enable clever placements.
- Rules may be dense; players may need a careful read to fully leverage the mechanics.
- engineering, resource allocation, and tower optimization
- Tower-building contest with competitive bidding
- mechanical, strategic, puzzle-like with a competitive edge
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- bidding for market cards — Each turn revolves around bidding to acquire market cards, with higher bids winning the right to draw or take cards that impact scoring.
- scoring via towers — Each card is worth one point, with special rules amplifying values via tower structure and special card interactions (zeros cap, eights enable stacking, etc.).
- tower construction progression — Players build five Towers, staged from highest to lowest value, creating a vertical scoring track across the game.
- value manipulation and placement — Some cards allow placing higher numbers on top of lower numbers; specific cards (zero and eight) have special functions that affect placement, top-heaviness, and end-game scoring dynamics.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- here are three really beautiful games in
- I can't believe I made it through it love it