Constructing the Golden Temple

🕌 Amritsar is a game by Ludonova , the same publisher who brought us Sabika. Sabika was one of my favorite releases from Spiel 22 , which is why I was excited for Spiel 23‘s release, Amritsar: The Golden Temple. Also the main thing that attracted me to it was a rondel for action selection combined with the Mancala mechanic. I’d say that is a match made in heaven! 😅

The game board is divided into 4 parts, with 2 sections each. This is the rondel where you will move game pieces around: Elephant meeples move on the outside 4 spaces, and the neutral workers of 4 colors on the inside 8 spaces.
Whenever it is your turn you can move your elephant, then pick up every worker from a section and place them one by one in the next sections clockwise. ☝️ Wherever the last worker lands will determine which action(s) you can take - you can choose 1 of 3 actions tiles, all of which show a primary action, and a secondary action that is only activated if the color matches with the worker. Additionally if your elephant is in the same part, you get a bonus action. So if you play effectively you can chain together 3 actions on a turn.

But what are you trying to achieve with these actions? 🧐 Well, everything revolves around the titular Golden Temple - you are mainly gathering marble, copper and gold to donate it to the 4 sections of the temple to help with the rebuilding efforts (both for immediate prestige points, and to satisfy your objective tiles). There are 3 tracks on your player board to go up on, four different objective tile types you have to play to be able to score, and you have limited storage that you can upgrade with storehouses. All of these additional mechanics serve to bolster the central goal: gathering and donating resources. The game goes for 3 rounds, with 4 actions each, then you score to see who won. 🏆

Focusing on this one thing makes this game an optimization puzzle: you will always do the same thing, but try to do it better than your opponents. There isn’t any kind of point salad here, which is why Amritsar probably won’t become a favorite for us, even though the central action selection mechanism is splendid.