Tabletop for Kids: 'Treasure X: Quest for Gold'

What Is Treasure X: Quest for Gold?

Treasure X: Quest for Gold is a fun exploration, card management, and press your luck game for 2-4 players, ages five and up, and takes about 20 minutes to play. It’s currently available for purchase.

Treasure X: Quest for Gold Components

1 of 7 possible Surprise Treasure X action figure (used as the Treasure Hunter marker during gameplay)
56 Cards
48 Treasure Tiles
1 Mountain Deck Holder
1 Game Board
1 Instruction Booklet

How to Play Treasure X: Quest for Gold

The Goal

The goal of the game is to have the most treasure points at the end of the game.

Setup

Before setting up the game, you will open and reveal your Treasure X action figure. It wouldn’t be Treasure X without a mystery figure! The figure consists of seven pieces (head, torso, arms and legs, and a treasure or weapon). Game setup is pretty easy and just takes a few minutes from there.

The game board unfolds and the mountain deck holder is slotted into the corner. The cards are shuffled (I personally have a hard time shuffling small cards like this but the size makes holding them easier for kids) and placed into the top of the mountain. The tiles are sorted into three types – treasure chests, rocks, and trees. Each pile should be mixed without looking at the under side. Each sand space (not the center compass or water space) on the gameboard gets a treasure chest tile, then a rock tile on top of that, and lastly a tree tile on top of that. The treasure hunter is placed on the center compass space.

Each player is dealt five cards to begin the game.

Gameplay

Gameplay consists of using up to three cards from your hand to move the treasure hunter or take special actions and collect tiles. (See types of special action cards below).

Each movement card features a cardinal direction and matches both the color and corresponding letter (N, S, E, and W) on the map to make it easy for all ages to know what each card does. When the treasure hunter is moved to a space with tiles on it, one tile is flipped over. If the tile is a treasure chest, it requires a Key Card or a Key Token to unlock. Any Key card or Token used to unlock a chest is discarded. Any tile that is flipped over gets put into the Stash Box.

After the first movement and collection is made, the player has the option to keep playing up to three more cards or movements. This is where the press your luck component of the game comes in because six of all the tiles in the game are Exis tiles. Exis is the baddie of the game (though no story beyond ‘it’s bad’ is really given) and when an Exis tile is revealed, the player’s turn ends and any tiles already in the Stash Box are lost.

One special type of space on the board are Ship Spaces (the blue ones featuring a pirate ship). These spaces can be treated as a regular space when landed on OR the player can immediately sail to any other ship space. These are great for hopping around the board when an area has been cleaned out (or to end your turn with the pirate hunter purposely sent to a barren area to thwart other players).

If the player decides to end their turn early or plays three cards without revealing Exis, then the tokens are collected from the Stash Box and added to their inventory. The player can discard any number of cards and then draw back up to five cards. If the cards run out, simply reshuffle the discard pile.

Special Actions

There are four kinds of special action cards — Rush, Sail, Stash, and Key Cards.

Rush cards feature a double move icon and allow the player to move the treasure hunter two spaces in any cardinal direction, flipping the token on each space moved. (These are also useful for moving back and forth between the same two spots to dig deeper on a location).

Sail cards allow the player to jump the treasure hunter to any Ship space on the board.

Stash cards allow a player to flip over an extra tile on the space the land on. If one of the tiles is a treasure chest, it still requires a Key card or Key Tokens to unlock.

Key cards function exactly like Key Tokens and are used to unlock a treasure chest tile. They are discarded after one use.

Game End

The game ends when four Exis tiles are revealed. At that point, treasure points are tallied up – one point for each money bag and three points for each golden treasure. Any key tokens still held at the end of the game do not score any points. The player with the most treasure points wins!

Why You Should Play Treasure X: Quest for Gold

My son loved the game, and after having played it over a dozen times now, I also haven’t gotten bored of it like I do with a lot of games made for kids. There is enough randomization with the tiles that the game doesn’t ever become too stagnant or obvious, and it’s also great to watch kids learning the basic mechanics that lead into all the games we love as adults — press your luck, strategy, offense versus defensive planning, deck management. My son quickly learned that always trying to get as much treasure as possible every turn wasn’t going to ensure a win, and that sometimes playing defensively to stiffle other players can be advantageous.