Build Your Dream Home – One Tile at a Time!

Are you ready to get new furniture for your home? 😊 We moved to a new house “relatively recently”, and finding the right furniture was definitely fun, though exhausting too at the same time. 

🏠 Happy Home from Alley Cat Games brings you this kind of fun, but in a more pleasant and carefree way. (Like not having to assemble huge wardrobes yourself. 😅 )

This is a polyomino tile-laying puzzle game, which immediately gives me 🧵 Patchwork vibes, both because of the polyominoes, but also because it utilises a time track to determine player order. However it has different rules and flow, and it is designed for 2-5 players. ☝️

There’s a small rondel track with player meeples, which is filled with cards. The player who is last on the track gets to go first and take a card. You can freely jump forward to grab a piece you desperately need, but if you go too far, it might be a while before it’s your turn again. When you take a card, you place the depicted tile into your home. 😉

Tile placement is fairly easy: 🧩 place inside the grid, and don’t block doorways. Oh, and each furniture has a designated room as shown by their background color - only rugs or plants can be placed freely into any room. Some furniture must also be placed along a wall.

Your choices for which cards to take and where to place them are guided by multiple scoring conditions:

• 🛋️ You want to get all 3 furniture types for each room to score more points. (Like a bathtub, sink and toilet for the bathroom.) 
• 🪑 Every piece of furniture has a color. You want to have each color present in as many rooms as possible.
• 🃏 Fulfilling the condition shown on the current game’s objective card is also rewarded.
• 🌱 Plants with more open spaces next to them are worth more points.
• 🏚️ Finally, you want to cover up scratches as they are worth minus points.

At first, I was worried that restricting polyominoes to specific rooms might make the game too simple, but balancing different furniture types and colors keeps it engaging—especially as rooms fill up quickly with these irregular shapes! Happy Home is also a pretty fast game, so you can quickly start again to design another dream house layout. 😊