Trash or Cash

• Designer: Erik Huang
• Publisher: Syzygy Games
• Players: 3-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15-30 minutes
• Played with copy provided by Taiwan Boardgame Design

In Trash or Cash, players take on the role of scavengers in an underground world. Each turn presents a massive garbage puzzle, and players must decide whether to accept the potentially space-consuming puzzle piece. Declining incurs a compensation fee, while accepting grants the full compensation. Players must strategically manage their space, earning additional compensation for collecting pieces of the same series.

Various module cards are also provided to add more challenges for players, ensuring each game offers a unique experience. Balancing the accumulation of garbage with financial sustainability becomes crucial as players navigate this intricate underworld.

To set up, randomly draw one of the module cards and place it on the table, using any special setup rules dictated by the card. The basic trash tile cards are shuffled and two are removed from the game, forever unseen.  The remainder are split into two 9-card piles.  Each player is given a player board and gets 6 silver coins from the supply.

The game will be played in two rounds, each using one of the trash pile decks made in setup.  To start a round, the top card of the pile is flipped up.  Then, on a player turn, there are two options:

1] Pay and Skip – place a coin on the current card and play moves to the left.

2] Take the trash – take the trash tile shown on the card and collect all the coins on it. Place the tile on your board. You can flip and/or rotate the tile. They must be placed on grid spaces, nothing can exceed the grid.  Some spaces on the board will cost you coins in order to cover them. If you get a tile of a color you already have, you gain Subsidy coins equal to the total number you have of that color.  If you take a tile and cannot legally place it, you are eliminated from the game.

Once a card is taken, the next card is flipped up and the same process continues around the table. The round continues until the entire pile is depleted.  All players now place a scoring token on the penalty space to the right of the highest row occupied by a trash tile on their board.

Repeat the process in the second round using the other stack of cards.  Players now tally their points. Each player will have two negative penalties marked on their board.  Any leftover coins are positive points.  The player with the highest score (i.e. least negative) wins the game. Ties broken in favor of the player with fewer coins.

My thoughts on the game

Trash or Cash is a fun little puzzle/space efficiency game.  I have always liked games where you arrange polyominoes, so this one definitely caught my eye when I was reading up on the new games from Spiel.  It might feel a bit familiar as it shares some similarities to Geschenkt/No Thanks with the auction.

There is a nice balance between the risk/reward of taking a card.  When you’re early in turn order, you’re less likely to take a card because there aren’t many coins on it yet… Later in the round, the payoff of coins will make it more likely you’ll be willing to take a badly shaped tile.  The confounding issue is the Subsidy payments.  You get rewarded for having tiles of the same color, and that might sway you into taking a tile…

There is definitely a little fun cat-and-mouse game as the group tries to figure out the worth of taking a tile… you can’t pass on cards forever, you’ll eventually run out of coins, so you have to pick and choose when it makes sense to bite the bullet and take one.  For many of our games, the group falls into a rhythm of the tile passing around the board one full rotation before people end up taking it – though later in the game, a tile that fits well AND gives a subsidy might get taken earlier.  You don’t want to run out of coins because then you’ll be left in a bad spot, possibly one where you have to take multiple tiles in a row without getting a lot of payment in return.

As you pick up these different tiles, you now have to figure out how to place them on your board to limit the overall height of your stack.  Interestingly, you do not have to slide them down your board “tetris-style”, you are free to place them anywhere – but if you choose not to concentrate them near the bottom of your board, you certainly risk a higher penalty.

I also like the way the seven different module cards affect the game.  Each adds one different major rule to the game, and you really do have to approach the game a bit differently for each one.  We have played by the suggestion in the rules to simply randomly choose one, and this helps keep the game interesting.  Without the modules, I think the game would get stale after even just a few plays.

The scoring bit at the end is a little weird with the penalties being huge negatives only minimally offset by the coins left over.  This is a game where the winner will surely be the person with the “least negative” score. It’s a minor quibble though, and I’m sure that gamers will be able to figure it out without too much issue.

Trash and Cash offers you a little bit of thinky auction action along with your polyomino puzzle here, and the game has enough variety to keep it interesting each time it comes out.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor