Treasure Hunter is an Underrated Gem
This card drafting classic is worth a rewind (and a reprint)
For the month of December I’ll make a few recommendations about various games I’d recommend for holiday gatherings, games that and reflect on what my faves from this year were.
In the meantime Shut Up & Sit Down’s yearly guide is a great place to start…
I’d also like to highlight Solitomb by Jacob Wasilewski. His other game, Slipways, is a personal favorite and also on sale at the Steam Sale this week. Solitomb is one of a number of games playing around with the solitaire format with interesting twists and turns. I haven’t had a chance to play but I am excited to dig in soon.
Enough of the preview. Onto the article!
Richard Garfield, Card Drafting, and Me
Richard Garfield might be addicted to making drafting games.
Since publishing Magic: the Gathering, certainly his most famous card-drafting game (and his most famous game), Garfield has continued to iterate with a variety of mechanics related to probability and chance. Card drafting is the one he comes back to the most: first with Treasure Hunter, and then with Bunny Kingdom and Carnival of Monsters. His enchantment with the formula relates to how easy and flexible it is to implement. Take a card, pass the rest is easy to explain and can go almost anywhere.
Other designers have also taken their crack at the genre, with games like the popular 7 Wonders or Sushi Go and other games who have incorporated the mechanic as the foundation of a more complex game like Inis and Ginkgopolis.
I might be addicted to playing drafting games designed by Richard Garfield.1
Richard Garfield has made quite a few duds, I think. But when he hits it can feel like a defining game of the genre that you can introduce to almost anyone. King of Tokyo is Yahtzee but with Godzilla monsters, and Fibble continues to be the most interesting twist on Wordle I’ve seen come out.
Other games however, tend to find their way slipping into oblivion, and mostly rightly so. Except for Treasure Hunter.
Now out of print, Treasure Hunter is an underrated gem and perhaps the best pure drafting game ever published. And now seems like a great time to do a “rewind”2 and revisit the game.
Treasure Hunter
Treasure Hunter holds a special place in my heart because it was one of the first games I played as a newly minted software engineer at a small interior design startup. We played in the office, in the (at the time) new fangled style industrial building with exposed concrete and windows everywhere, while night set against the backdrop of the mountains. It’s a game that I introduced to people who I just started working with, trying to convince them that I had a bunch of interesting and unique board games that they might enjoy playing. And I like to think it mostly paid off.
The Game
Treasure Hunter is ostensibly a game about “hunting for treasure”. But it’s really quite a loose theme that takes you just far enough to have fun but not so far it constricts the game with its thematic integration. It is a drafting game all the way down. Over the course of three rounds, you will be dealt a hand of cards, pick one, past the rest on until you run out of cards. Then you will reveal your hand, resolve special effects, and take your coins and treasure.
There are four sorts of resources you are trying to manage. The coins you collect, the adventures of various colors (red, green, and blue), the dogs you collect to fight off the goblins, and the action cards you can collect to do special things.
One of the delights of a drafting game is how you mostly have a single decision in front of you at any given time, but you often feel constrained by the cards that have been plucked from your hand.
The biggest challenge with card drafting games, though, is being able to basically completely ignore the existence of other players. From a design perspective it can be so easy to simply lock in on the challenges in front of you and completely ignore what other players might or might not do.
Design Brilliance
Design-wise what makes Treasure Hunter so smart is that you’re trying to hit a moving target with a broad number of conditions. You will care about getting the most or the least of one of the adventurer types to collect the right treasure, just enough dogs to protect you from the goblins, and maybe an affect or two to swing the game in your favor. So instead of being heads down in your own world you often have to deduce what you think other players might be up to.
Not only that, sometimes the treasures are negative, which means you want to end up in the middle instead of being first or last! This sort of variance completely breaks the biggest problem with card drafting games wide open. It makes maxing out a single resource sub-optimal because you want to be excellent in as many categories as possible.
For the simplicity of the game, the tension of decision making could be ratcheted up quite high. And from a gameplay narrative perspective, the end of the round was this huge reveal where we got to look around the table to see who accomplished their goals and whether or not we actually managed to do what we wanted. Often to hilarious effect.
Thematic Humor
Back on his old podcast Three Donkeys (I was a normal child), Garfield noted that one of the areas of games you have to embrace is the possibility for absurdity. He mentioned this moment in Magic: The Gathering where it’s possible to give a mammoth wings so it could fly. And instead of stamping it out, you have to lean into these sorts of impossibilities with the game. One of the things I appreciate most about a Richard Garfield game is how internally consistent they often aren’t.
And it’s the absurdity of Treasure Hunter that was charming. For example, one of the goals is to collect enough dogs to ward off the goblins that will attack you and steal your coins. But then if you collect the most dogs you’ll protect yourself from the goblins but also all of the gold the goblins stole from the other players. It creates this tense gameplay where you can decide how far you want to push, but thematically this is nonsensical. It conjures this image of a wild pay for protection racket or like you’re just chilling and waiting until all the other weaker adventures roam through, get beat up and then riding up to collect all their belongings. You become this group of bumbling adventurers who occasionally luck into treasure but mostly spend their time trying to avoid getting totally wrecked by curses or the goblins that appear.
The absurdity created space for me and my new friends to inject our own stories into.
Someone Should Reprint This Game
As I said before, Treasure Hunter is currently out of print. According to Board Game Geek there might be a few floating around in stores or on eBay but it’s certainly not a game you can find easily. Technically, I think, I shouldn’t be writing about this. I should recommend a game like Sushi Go! or Citadels, which are both available to play right now!
But, in my heart of hearts I think Treasure Hunter is a much better game and is approachable to a pretty broad array of board game players. One day, I hope someone will pick it back up and put it in a smaller box so more people can discover its absurd brilliance.
In all fairness a lot of this is probably the fondness I have for Magic: the Gathering. But I also just think card drafting continues to be an underexplored design to crafting a delightful game experience. It’s really easy to explain and the strategic depth can be quite immense without having a lot of complexity that can be off-putting for newer players.
Is anyone actually using this term anymore?