A clever classic

🏘️ Tiny Towns is a very clever puzzle game all about spatial planning and taking risks to eke out more points than your rivals. It’s quick and fun to play!

🔨 Each turn, the ‘master builder’ names a resource (out of 5) then everyone has to place a cube 🧊 of that color into their 4x4 grid. Then the next player becomes the master builder. This means you will get a bunch of random cubes, but every few rounds get to decide what to place.

⚙️ You are placing these cubes in an effort to match the ‘recipes’ that are on the building cards. They all show specific tetris-shapes in different color combinations. Whenever you complete a shape, you can place that building on one of the tetris’ squares, returning all used resources to the supply. Buildings have effects - they all provide points but usually only if some specific condition is met; like cottages have to be fed in order to score so you have to build some granaries to supply them properly.

🛑 The game ends for you when your grid is full. The other players then get to play on until they fill up their town too.

💭 I love that each building type has different cards from which you randomly choose one during setup. So the recipes and abilities keep changing between games. There are 7 different building types, plus Monuments, which are player specific special buildings with unique effects.

It can be hard juggling multiple constructions at the same time - unlucky cube-placements and a wave of wrong resources can easily spell doom for you. We play this game pretty relaxed, focusing on our town, but you can always try to explicitly deny others if that's your thing.

Another highlight of the game are the wooden buildings. They are all chunky, and look incredible and colorful 😍 - which is important because the whole game is about placing them!

🃏 There is a variant in which you play with a deck of cards to determine what resources you will place. Every 3 rounds you can pick a resource of your choice. I enjoy the game more with this variant and recommend it in 2 player games. Otherwise you get what you want every second turn and that makes the game too easy.