Pattern matching in the future

❓ Have you played Neotopia? If not, you might have seen it already! It has these awesome circular acrylic tokens, which is one of my favorite types of board game components. They are so colorful and clink together so joyfully. 🥰

Neotopia is about building a futuristic city 🏗️ together with your rival players. To do this you will be placing the acrylic tokens on the board to match patterns on your project cards. The board is divided into 3 sectors by 3 factories. You will be counting your score separately for each sector, which is important, as you will triple the score of your worst one at the end. So you really have to build everywhere! 👷

The game structure is simple, which makes games quite fast. ☝️Players perform 3 actions on their turn, which is either drawing a project card or placing an acrylic token from a factory to an adjacent sector. Completing cards is free and your only way to earn victory points. You can collect bonus tokens from the board which can spice up your turns with additional actions or abilities.

As factories run out of tokens, they are filled up from the middle of the board, then you flip a card to see what tokens come to the middle to fill up the next empty factory. These cards in the middle are also the timer for the game. ⏱️ Factories, and what tokens they have will always be a limitation to what you can do, and you can also only place tokens adjacent to already placed tokens.

Another important and intriguing thing is that the 4 token colors correspond to the 4 player colors! 🧐 At the end of the game players get bonus points for the biggest contiguous group of tokens of their color in each sector, so you have to pay attention not to let anyone expand too much.

Neotopia is all about pattern recognition. If you like this, you'll like the game. Watching sectors for opportunities to finish your cards, possibly trying to block other players while doing so, making big groups of your color, and balancing all 3 sectors. Very easy to learn, ideal for a gateway experience. 🙂