GoCaine is a bit silly. As hinted by its title, this design combines the ancient game of Go with a cocaine trafficking setting that is both weird and enthralling. It’s half abstract conflict with heady token placement to establish your cartel cells, and half economic management as you build up infrastructure and turn your large swathes of cash into coke so that you may later turn it back into even larger piles of money.
First time designer Richard Nguyen- Marshall self-published this design in 2021. It’s an odd melding of traditional, almost old-school elements with a seemingly fresh product that eschews the new normal of crowdfunding and overproduced glitz.
There’s a real spark of creative energy here that is expressed through play.
The goal is to race to one billion US dollars. You start with a modest sum which is used to build up your capabilities as well as to procure drugs. You can buy or sell cocaine cubes at each location on the map, with the price being lower the farther South you head, all the way to Bolivia. The cost is of course higher the farther North you go. This leads to a natural trafficking pipeline of buying low and then shipping drugs to Canada and the US in order to sell for higher prices.