Carcassonne: Gold Rush

Today's review is of the 2014 release, Carcassonne: Gold Rush.  For 2-5 players, it takes 35 minutes.

Overview
Gold Rush is a twist on the original Carcassonne.  Like its parent, it's a tile-laying game, where you draw and place a tile each turn, and place workers to gain the most points.  Everything in the base game is represented here, in some way.  Cities (original game) = mountains here, abbeys = towns, roads = railroads, workers = cowboys, etc.  Please see my original post for more in-depth treatment; here, I'll cover only the differences.

In Gold Rush, whenever you place a tile with a mountain, it has a symbol with 1-3 gold nugget(s) on it.  Randomly place that many mining tokens on the space- these can be picked up by players on subsequent turns.  On your turn, you:
- draw and place a tile,
- place a cowboy on the new tile OR place/move your tent to a mountain OR take one mining token from a mountain where your tent is located,
- check if any of your cowboys are on completed features.  If so, they can be scored and returned to your pool.

game in progress; image from here

The game goes until the tiles are all placed.  Then remaining cowboys on incomplete features are scored, gold nuggets (from the mining tokens) are scored, and final scores are tallied- highest total wins!

Review
If you like Carcassonne, you'll probably like this.  Some prefer it to the original; I like them both, but have a mild preference for the twists in this variant.  The main twists are tents and mining tokens, and (in my opinion) they do add something valuable to the game, giving you meaningful choices that the original does not (do I place a cowboy, move my tent, or take a mining token?  There's almost always a decision, whereas the base game lacks this if you've placed all your workers).  Both versions are winners.

Rating: A-