Your Turn and the Trail
Great Western Trail's turn: moving your cattleman, step limit, green and black hand fees, using a location, auxiliary actions instead of local ones, drawing up, and your herd deck.
Starting with the player who has 6 dollars, players take turns clockwise. Your turn has three phases, always in this order:
- Phase A — move your cattleman
- Phase B — use the location you reached
- Phase C — draw up to your hand limit
Your first turn
On your very first turn you place your cattleman on any neutral building (others may be there too) and go straight to phase B. After each visit to Kansas City your cattleman starts again from the horseman space at the lower right of the board.
Phase A: move your cattleman
Locations are Kansas City and every tile on the trail — buildings, hazards and teepees. Empty spaces are not locations and cost nothing to pass.
- Move at least 1 location, never more than your step limit: 3 at two or three players, 4 at four players (the player count tile). Clearing the step-limit discs adds +1 and +1 (two players) or +2 and +1 (three or four players).
- Each location you enter is one step. Always move forward along the arrows; at a fork choose a branch.
- You may stop before your limit. You cannot pass Kansas City: you stop there.
- Other cattlemen never block you.
Hands and fees
Moving onto or over a location showing a green or black hand costs a fee at once — to the bank for a hazard or teepee, to the owner for another player’s building:
| Players | Green hand | Black hand |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 2 dollars | 2 dollars |
| 3 | 2 dollars | 1 dollar |
| 4 | 1 dollar | 2 dollars |
A location with both hands costs both. Your own buildings never charge you.
Phase B: use the location
What you may do depends on where you stopped:
- A neutral building or one of your own buildings: take its local actions (the icons in its lower half, usually two, separated by full dividers) — each once, in any order, any or all of them. An action with a cost or requirement needs it met in full. Where two actions share one box, split by a white slash, choose one. Or, only if you take none of them, take one single auxiliary action.
- Another player’s building, a hazard or a teepee: one single auxiliary action.
- Kansas City: the five Kansas City subphases, in order.
A risk action printed on a building space becomes an extra local action of the building placed there, for its owner.
You may forfeit a reward in full or in part — except dollars: a dollar reward is always taken in full.
Phase C: draw up to your hand limit
Draw from your draw stack until you hold as many cards as your hand limit: 4 at the start, 5 and 6 once you clear the hand-limit discs. After Kansas City you draw a whole new hand. Then the next player’s turn begins.
Your herd deck
Your herd deck is your draw stack (face down, left of your board), your hand and your discard pile (face up). Every card you gain — cattle, objectives — goes onto the discard pile. When you must draw and the draw stack is empty, then (and only then) shuffle the discard pile into a new draw stack.
You may look through your discard pile at any time, never your draw stack.
You start with 14 cattle cards of low value: 5 Jersey (1), 3 Dutch Belt (2), 3 Black Angus (2) and 3 Guernsey (2) (cattle).