Review

build your own individual town

Tiny Towns

Urban development with cubes and cards

Tiny Town is justly named; the city that we build is tiny and we have only 4x4 slots on our board to build our town. Therefore, we need to plan our building and always try to use interdependences between buildings. But before we can build, the designer has assigned us the task of collecting resources to build our houses with. The game features 25 building cards, showing icons for the building type, colored squares for the necessary resources and their arrangement - there are five resources, wood, wheat, brick, glass, and stone - as well as icons / text for the effects of the building.

At the start of the game the Cottage card is laid out, all other buildings are stacked by type, face-down, and the top card of each stack is revealed; those buildings are the ones available for this game. Rounds in the game comprise four phases; every player must have completed the current phase before a new one begins.

Phase 1 is discovering resources; the top resources card is revealed. In Phase 2, resource placement, you take one resource of the revealed type and put it into your town on a free slot. In rounds 3, 6, 9 etc. no resource card is revealed, each player takes one resource of his choice from stock. If you can place a resource, you must take it. Phase 3 - Building; if you have resources of the necessary type in the arrangement necessary for one of the buildings, you can build it by giving back the resources and placing the building on one of the slots previously occupied by the resources. The building ability can now be used. You can build each of the displayed buildings as often as you want, if you have room for it; the only exception is the Memorial that you selected at the start, you can only build this once. But take care - each building reduces the room for resources! You need not use resources, even if you could, but can keep them on the board for later use. When all players have filled all slots with buildings or resources, the game ends. You remove all resources and score your buildings for interdependence minus empty slots in town.

Another game that is not as simple as it looks at first glance, because the values of buildings change dramatically with their surroundings and with their interdependence with other buildings; the information is on the cards on display, so take a good look at those cards at the start of the game; only the Cottage is a fixture, all other buildings appear randomly in a game. By the way, to copy your neighbor will only give you the same amount of points! Tiny Towns is, of course, a multiplayer solitaire game, but a particularly good one! I like the idea and its implementation. That I have to allocate up to five slots on my board to resources before placing a building on only one of them, is a very clever mechanism!

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 1-6

Age: 14+

Time: 45+

Designer: Peter McPherson

Artist: Matt Paquette, Jessy Töpfer, Jens Wiese

Price: ca. 35 Euro

Publisher: AEG / Pegasus Spiele 2019

Web: www.pegasus.de

Genre: City building

Users: With friends

Special: 1 player

Version: de

Rules: cn de en es fr it kr nl pl th

In-game text: no

Comments:

Standard topic

Good minimal rules

Lots of interdependence between buildings

(c) Images Henk Rolleman

Compares to:

City building games using individual boards

Other editions:

AEG (en), Broadway Toys (cn), White Goblin Games (nl), Lucky Duck Games (fr), Raven Distribution (it), Korea Boardgames (kr), All in Games (pl), Arrakis, Fractal Juegos (es), Lanialan (th)

My rating: 6

Dagmar de Cassan:

Interesting and lots of fun with few components and few basic rules; the allure is in the plethora of building interdependence and the many possible building combinations for a game.

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 1

Action (dark green): 0