In pursuit of effectiveness
🛤️Minecart Town is a tranquil little tile-laying game about building a town that is basically an automated point-generating machine. During the game you are buying and placing buildings into your play area and connecting them with rails. 🏘️ Some buildings will generate resources, some will convert them, and some will use them up to generate points. Your goal is to assemble all of this in such a way that you score better than your opponents. 😉
The game is divided into 4 rounds, all of which consist of 4 phases:
⛏️In the Production phase all buildings produce resources as indicated, but only if there is place for cubes on them.
🏗️In the Construction phase you are spending your wood and stone cubes to acquire new buildings, always placing them orthogonally adjacent to your existing tiles. The display will always be refreshed with new tiles from a bag, but you could also buy rails to connect your buildings.
🚚In the Transportation phase you can move your cubes around via your rail network, but this can be tricky as tiles next to each other don’t count as adjacent, only when connected by rails.
⚙️Finally in the Processing phase buildings can use up resources you transported there to make other resources or points.
There are 5 resources in the game and quite an array of building tiles. Many of them work in a similar way, but there are some more special buildings too that want to be adjacent to specific things.
💭Although your point engine and resources you generate will keep improving as rounds go by, your buying power of wood and stone mostly stays the same, so unfortunately you won’t be able to build a sprawling town. At least I was hoping we would have a huge automated city by the end. 😶 The focus of the game is actually to achieve as much as possible with the things you get, and place everything in the most optimal ways. Thus you get a contained lightweight game, packaged in a nice box with cozy pastel colors and clean art. 🙂 For fans of Century and similar games this should be a hit.
