A lightweight game needs to do two things well to be a hit with new players and people who only enjoy these lighter games. They need to be fun, and they need to have a theme which appeals to a wide demographic. Tenpenny Parks nails it on both counts. Entry-level worker-placement combined with polyomino placement covers things mechanically, while the theme of building an amusement park isn’t likely to find too many detractors. It manages to do both things really well, resulting in a game I think I could teach to just about anybody and be confident that they’d have a good time.

Parks and Rec

The idea of the game is simple. Each player has their own board which represents the land they’re going to develop into a top-notch amusement park. They also each have three oversized wooden worker meeples. The main part of the game has the players take turns placing a worker at a time on the various spaces on the board. Anyone who’s been here before knows what to expect. There are four shared spaces which anyone can go to as many times as they like: the Bank (get $2), the Arborist (remove two trees), the Contractor (get little concession tiles for your park) and the Realtor (get expansion boards to make your park bigger).

The other spaces surround the biggest piece of eye candy – the gorgeous carousel in the middle of the board. Each of the six spaces around it relates to one of six decks of cards, each of which features attractions for your park. Those spaces are first-come, first-served, and can offer discounts as well as penalties to some of the prices. There can be real competition for these, which makes being the first player really important. More on that later. If you buy a card you get the associated polyomino tile to add to your park.

Building your park is similar to games like Patchwork, Barenpark and even heavier games like A Feast for Odin. You can build anywhere there isn’t a tree in the way, but it almost feels like a shame to hire the arborist and shift some trees, because they’re gorgeous little wooden pieces and I want more on my board, not fewer dammit! The biggest divergence from games like Barenpark and Isle of Cats is that no two tiles can have touching edges. No exceptions. Touching diagonal corners is fine, just keep all that orthogonal nonsense out of here. Once you realise how this works you suddenly understand the puzzle of trying to make things fit, and the importance of clearing trees and adding extra boards. It’s tricky.

Making tracks

There’s a cool mechanism added at the bottom of the main board in the form of three shared tracks. Building attractions and concession stands give you bumps along these tracks, each of which is evaluated once in each of the five rounds of the game. If you’re ahead on the Thrill track you can take a step back for a bonus worker for the following round. In a game with only 15 turns, every extra turn can be huge. The player furthest ahead on the Awe track can opt to lose a step to take the first player shovel, which not only lets you take the first turn, but also choose which way you want to like the carousel to point for the next round. Finally, the leader on the Joy track can also choose to lose a step and claim $3. It might not sound like much, but money is tight in Tenpenny Parks.

I love these tracks for the choices they make players make. As I mentioned at the outset, this is a light game, so forcing choices like these is a glimpse into what more complicated games offer. You don’t have to take the bonuses after all. You can opt not to and claim a VP and stay ahead on the track, which might prove valuable if you have a private goal card which wants you to be furthest ahead on a certain track for bonus points at the end of the game.

There’s another really interesting phase of each round. Each completed attraction (except the Souvenir shops, which boost income) gives players an option to spend their hard-earned cash on advertising, bringing in more VPs per round. It sounds like a no-brainer to do it, but sometimes you might have your eye on a really lucrative, but expensive attraction in the next round. No money means a trip to the banker, which means one less worker to use. Maybe not Lacerda-level brain melting, but certainly enough agency to get players invested in their park.

Friendly and inviting

I need to take a few lines to explain how impressed I am with the production of Tenpenny Parks for the most part. The carousel was a pain to put together for me, not least because some of the panels had delaminated, but because it’s a tight fit. However, once it’s done it feels incredibly solid, and it’s not coming apart anytime soon. Having a huge hole in the main board is unusual, but having the carousel slot in so nicely is great.

The big, chunky workers are a nice touch, as are the thick, sturdy tokens throughout. The whole thing is blocked out with bold, poster paint colours that lend to its newbie-friendly table presence. Nothing about the game is intimidating or overbearing. It looks, feels, and indeed is perfect for lightweight gamers.

The only downside from a development and production point of view is the choice of colours for two of the attraction types. Given the stark colours used throughout, it seems odd that the souvenirs and Old West attractions are yellow and yellowy-brown respectively. It’s not the end of the world, but it stuck in my brain each time I played it that I mistook the colours of the cards more than once, and that’s the sort of thing I’m duty-bound to moan about in a review. See what you think in the picture below. It might just be a ‘me’ problem.

Final thoughts

Tenpenny Parks makes me smile. My chosen board game world is one of muted beige and dry themes, so Tenpenny Parks stands out like a neon helter-skelter in the middle of it. I love it for that. The bright colours, streamlined gameplay, and open, friendly approach to the game are lovely. As a self-confessed heavy game nerd, I’m also appreciative of the fact that there’s still enough game in there to sink my teeth into while the rest of my family are content to make nice-looking parks, and enjoy the game for what it is – a fun time. Importantly, the game doesn’t take hours to play. Five rounds and you’re done, all within 90 minutes. There’s a lot to be said for that brevity in a modern game.

Despite my grumble about the colours above, Vincent Dutrait’s artwork again stands head-and-shoulders above many. I love the wooden pieces, they’re chunky, tactile and fun to use. There’s a bit of a disconnect between me buying a crazy rollercoaster and then putting a small cardboard tile on my park mat, but equally I’d be complaining about a big plastic mini obscuring my view if it was the other way around. I’m an ornery monkey at times.

There’s not enough here to satisfy you if your regular group usually contends with fare from Messrs Lacerda and Turczi, but if you’ve got a group you want to edge towards medium-weight games, or a family that rolls their eyes when you lovingly stroke your copy of Civolution (read my review of that here, right after you finish this one), Tenpenny Parks will be a hit. Polyomino placement is fun, worker placement is fun, the game is beautiful, and thematically it outperforms so many other games in the same space. A lightweight heavy-hitter.

Tenpenny Parks (2022)

Design: Nate Linhart
Publisher: Thunderworks Games
Art: Vincent Dutrait
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 45-75 mins

The post Tenpenny Parks Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Tiny Towns Review

Tiny Towns is a damning indictment on urban sprawl, overcrowding, and an ever-expanding society’s need for quick, affordable housing! Actually, it’s not. It’s a really cute abstract puzzle about space optimisation, forward planning, and the most adorable little wooden buildings. These days you need a controversial strapline to pull people in though, so with that out of the way, let’s take a look at AEG and Peter McPherson’s 2019 puzzler.

Who lives on your block?

Tiny Towns revolves around the use of wooden blocks. Loads and loads of little wooden cubes of various colours. In the middle of the table there are some cards showing you the buildings you can construct during the game. Farms, cottages, theatres, inns – that sort of thing. Each building is made of a few cubes placed in the correct places on your 4×4 player board. It might be as simple as a well, which is a brown and a grey cube next to one another (wood and stone, respectively), or something more complicated, like a bakery. A bakery is two red blocks, with a blue block between, and a yellow block next to that, like a Tetris T-piece.

Nice and easy so far. Get some blocks, make nice patterns on the board. Here’s where things get interesting though. The shapes for each building can be rotated and flipped to your heart’s content, as long as the blocks’ relative positions to one another is correct. When you finish a shape, during your turn you can remove the cubes that have gone towards it and take one of the cute wooden buildings that represent it, and place it in any of the spaces the cubes were. So now that thing that was taking up four of your precious 16 squares only takes up one, and you can start working towards something else.

Merge in turn

If the idea of the game so far sounds familiar, but you’re not sure why, there’s a good chance you own a smartphone. If you’re not already playing one, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a thousand adverts for the recent craze of ‘merge games’. Drag three things together and pow!, you’ve got a new, slightly better thing. Repeat ad-nauseum. This idea is pretty close to the core concept for Tiny Towns, except there’s only ever one generation of merging.

At first, it seems like a pretty easy game. There’s plenty of space, and tons of options. Each of the building cards clearly shows how it’ll score at the end of the game, with relation to any of the other buildings on offer. For example, a cottage on its own scores nothing, but a farm on your board means that up to four cottages will score three points each. This is where things start to get tricky, however. For a start, you don’t always get to choose which resource cube you have to place next. Each player takes a turn naming a resource/colour, and all players have to place that same cube on their boards. Pretty annoying when you’re desperate for a wood cube but some joker keeps choosing stone. Better make sure you’ve got somewhere on your board it can still be useful, despite your best plans.

Then there’s the issue of space. At first it’s not an problem, but as the game progresses, each building permanently blocks a space. Not only do you have fewer squares available to place blocks, you also start blocking some possible shapes, because there just isn’t room for them. Very quickly you realise Tiny Towns is a game about optimisation. Optimisation of your space, and optimisation of your scoring opportunities.

Fun house

I’ve made the game seem very mechanical so far, so it’s time to tell you that Tiny Towns is fun, and to tell you why. Plotting what’s going to go where is so satisfying when it works out, and you end up with this miniature metropolis that banks you big points. But the real fun comes with the other players around the table. The cursing, the exasperated groans, and the “I cannot believe you chose brick!” cries of anguish. Your plans will almost never work out exactly the way you want it to, because some other git around the table is trying to do something else. Your player boards are visible to everyone, so it’s obvious to everyone (especially when someone takes it upon themselves to tell the table) when one player’s got a healthy lead.

I’ve played a four-player game where I was absolutely desperate for a brick to finish a high-scoring building near the end of the game, but the other players chose to pick anything except brick, just to force me to fill my board, thus ending my game. It doesn’t have to be played this way, with so much passive interaction, but if you’ve got a family or regular group playing, it can definitely happen. Far from being anger-inducing, it was really funny, because Tiny Towns isn’t a heavy, serious game. It’s a light, charming, quick game.

The biggest drawback Tiny Towns has is the one I just mentioned. When a player runs out of places to put blocks, it’s game over. Final scoring doesn’t happen until everyone has finished, and if you’re playing with newbies, it can mean they’ve got a little wait while the rest of the players construct their wooden wonders. It’s not a massive problem, unless you’re playing with lots of players. Out of the box it supports one to six players, but with enough cubes, printed player mats, or even pencils and paper, you could scale this game up to play with 50+ people.

Final thoughts

Tiny towns is a fantastic abstract puzzler. There are tons of different building types with different scoring conditions, which keep the game fresh and interesting. I love that it can play with pretty much any player count, if you don’t mind getting creative with making your own boards, or drawing on paper. There’s a solo mode included, where a deck of cards decide which colour cube you get next, which is a fun challenge and good practice for the main game.

If you don’t enjoy spatial puzzles, it’s probably not going to do much for you. Some people don’t enjoy them, and some people just don’t have a brain that works in that way, but then, not every game is going to appeal to everyone. A game usually takes comfortably under an hour, but scale that up for every extra player you have in the game.

If you like games like The Isle of Cats, Bärenpark, Patchwork, or even the aging Blokus, I think you’ll love Tiny Towns. It’s an interesting twist on the polyomino tile-placement genre, less than £35, and readily available. Plus, if you do find yourself getting tired with it, there are expansions to breathe new life into the game. For example, Tiny Towns: Villagers, which you can read about below.

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Tiny Towns: Villagers Review

There are a couple of expansions available for Tiny Towns, both coming out the year after the main game, in 2020. I was sent a copy of Tiny Towns: Villagers to review, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure what they could do with the formula so didn’t go into it with high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised.

As the title implies, the biggest new additions are the villagers. They’re a collection of cute animal meeples in the shapes of mice, squirrels, birds, and other little forest folk. Three of them get plonked into three corners of your board at the start of the game, and you’re given a second, teeny board to put in front of you too – a lodge. The lodge is just a holding board really, where villagers go when they’re removed from the board, but it also has a nice reminder of how buildings for villagers are formed.

Mousey housey

If you complete a building by placing the last block on the same space as a villager, they’re then actively working in whatever building it happens to be. At the start of the game, a couple of different villager abilities are chosen at random. When you have enough activated workers, you can choose to use these abilities, which vary from letting you build with fewer resources than you need, to replacing an entire building with a different kind.

If you’ve played the Tiny Towns base game, you’ll know that there’s already a lot to consider when you’re choosing what to build where, so you’ll understand the added layer of complexity the villagers add. For someone like me, that’s great. I love a game with a bit more meat on its bones, and Villagers is certainly meaty. It’s not even as simple as just making sure the buildings finish in a creature’s space, as you can purposely shunt them around the board until they’re in positions more in line with your plans.

In addition to the new meeples, there are also a decent number of new building cards thrown in too. You can happily play the base game and just add in the new buildings if you want to.

Final thoughts

When you look at what’s in the box, the ~£25 you’ll pay for Tiny Towns: Villagers can look a bit steep. It’s a handful of cards, six small boards, and 20 animal meeples. If your interest with Tiny Towns is “It’s okay, but I’m not crazy about it”, then I’d wait to catch it in a sale. If you love Tiny Towns however, Villagers is essential in my opinion. Especially if you love a bit more weight in your games. The added layer of strategy it throws in, with very little overhead, is very satisfying.

I wouldn’t recommend throwing anyone into their first or second game of Tiny Towns with Villagers included. There’s enough to get your head around already for those first few plays. The other place you might find a bit of hesitance is where you’ve successfully converted non-gaming parents, siblings, or friends to the original game. It might be a bridge too far if they’ve just about got to grips with the game.

For the rest of us though, if you don’t mind paying the £25, Villagers is a great expansion, adding a welcome layer of depth to an already-polished puzzle. Fans of Tiny Towns will really get a kick out of it, and let’s be honest – who doesn’t like playing with wooden squirrels?

Review copy kindly provided by Alderac Entertainment Group. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Tiny Towns is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Tiny Towns (2019)

Designer: Peter McPherson
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

Tiny Towns: Villagers (2020)

Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Art: Gong Studios
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-60 mins

The post Tiny Towns (+ Villagers Expansion) Review appeared first on Punchboard.

What’s In The Box?

Silver & Gold comes in a small box and comprises of some cards, a small rulebook, and some dry-wipe pens. There are four score cards for the players, one round tracker card that sits in the middle of the table, eight expedition cards, and finally 47 treasure map cards.

The cards are wipeable, but don’t feel overly plastic. Along with the cards are four dry-wipe markers which feel really nice to draw crosses with, and cover well when you write. And that’s all there is, I told you it was a small box game.

How Does It Play?

Setup

The idea of Silver & Gold is that the players are treasure hunters, landing on small islands and exploring, looking for gold. The way the game works is by players choosing two of the four treasure map cards they’re dealt, which go face-up in front of them. There are eight expedition cards, each with a polyomino shape on them. Before each round these are shuffled, and one discarded, unseen by the players. The round marker card shows a reminder of the eight possible shapes, but you never know which one won’t be in the current round.

Four treasure map cards are turned face-up in the middle of the table to create a supply, and then each player takes a marker and a scorecard, a starting player is chosen, and it’s time to play.

Gameplay

For each turn of the round, the starting player turns over the top card of the expedition deck. The card shows a shape. All of the players now cross that shape out on either of their treasure map cards. The shape can be rotated, mirrored and flipped, as long as the structure of it remains the same. If a player cannot (or doesn’t want to) cross the shape out, they can choose any one square on either card and cross that out instead.

Once every player has drawn their crosses, any player who has completed a card (starting with the starting player and working clockwise) can put the completed map to one side, and choose one of the four in the supply in the middle of the table to take. Then a new card from the treasure map deck takes its place.

Bonuses

Some of the squares that get crossed-out have bonus symbols on them, and each of them does something different.

Red crosses – when you cross out a red cross, you can immediately cross out another square of your choice on either of your cards. This can be worked into combinations where you might cross out a red cross, then choose to cross out another one, which then lets you cross out another one, and so on.

Coins – If you cross out a coin, you cross out the next available coin space on your scoring card, working from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Once an entire row is crossed-out, at the end of that turn each player (starting with the starting player again) crosses out the next available trophy on the round marker card, and writes the number on that trophy in the space at the end of that coin row on their score card. As the trophies get claimed, the rewards decrease.

Palm trees – When you cross out a palm tree you immediately score one point for that tree, plus an extra point per palm tree visible in the four card supply in the middle of the table. That score is written in a box at the bottom of your scoring card, but timing is crucial as you can only score palm trees four times in total during the game.

Scoring

After the last of the seven expedition cards is revealed, it’s the end of the round. The next round marker on the round card is crossed off, then all eight expedition cards are shuffled, one removed, and play continues just like the start of the game.

After the fourth and final round, final scores are calculated. Each map card you’ve completed has a point value at the top, and these are all totaled. Some cards also have a wax seal at the top, which award bonus points. As an example, if you had a card with an orange seal with a 2 in it, and another with a 1 in the seal, you would earn 3 (2 + 1) points per completed orange map in your possession.

You also score every crossed out coin, the trophy bonuses, and finally the palm tree bonuses. There’s a space for each of the subtotals on your scoring card. The winner is the person with the most total points. Now all you have to do is wipe the cards with a piece of try tissue, and it’s ready to play again!

Final Thoughts

Silver& Gold is a light, quick filler game. It’s perfect to begin or end a games night, or to play with the family if you’ve got younger children. I really like it, it’s very easy to teach, and for those of us who like heavier games and competition, there’s plenty of optimisation to aim for here. Aiming to always be able to cross out an entire shape with each expedition card is important, and using the red cross combos to fill in the awkward gaps on nearly-finished cards feels reminiscent of Ganz Schon Clever (check out the review here).

Similarly, it’s not always best to take the highest value cards you can see on the table either. You have to take into account palm trees, coins, and what seals you may be working with for bonus points.

It’s never going to be a game you play for hours, or ever every week, but it’s a charming, fun game, and a great one to get non-gamers engaging in something new and starting to think tactically. Given the fact you can pick it up for less than £12, delivered, if you’ve got a space in your collection for a lightweight filler, or even just a small gap in your Kallax that needs filling, you could do a lot worse. If you’re a fan of games like The Isle of Cats, Patchwork or Cartographers, I think you’ll really enjoy Silver & Gold.

The post Silver & Gold Review appeared first on Punchboard.