![]() ![]() And beyond the simplest answer, that people are not automatons but women and men with agency both moral and tetrahedral, Tiny Towns answers this query with one more type of card - and it’s simultaneously one of the game’s best ideas and one of its most precarious balancing acts. “If this is done simultaneously, with everyone using the same resource and same selection of buildings, what’s to prevent everyone from taking exactly the same move?” Each challenge is surprisingly different, despite revolving around the same basic premise that you’re gradually painting yourself into a corner with the same paint that’s scoring you heaps of points. One game will have you surrounding a Granary with Cottages with Wells, while the next might reward those who use a Trading Post to quickly build more Feast Halls than your neighbor. Where one play features a Bakery, which earns points by being situated directly next to farming or industrial building, the next might utilize a Theater, pulling in points for every unique building type in its row or column, or a Tailor, worth extra if it’s in the middle of town.Īnd every match has six of these types, with four cards apiece, meaning that every combination presents a fresh challenge. Within those broad archetypes, there’s some clever variety. There are two dozen of these public buildings, yet the game remains balanced because you’re always provided one of each type - farming, religious, entertainment, and so forth. Crucially, each game of Tiny Towns is played with seven public buildings, and other than the lowly cottage you’re never guaranteed the same options. Speaking of which, we should talk about the buildings, since they’re the beating heart of this thing. Soon you’re making trade-offs or struggling to mitigate your previous shortsightedness. A single misplaced cube might block off an entire quadrant, while an errant building fails to line up its bonuses with what you’re building nearby. Before long, however, space becomes severely limited. At first it’s an easy thing to hammer together a building, even one of the bigger ones. Like I said, it’s as simple as pastoral living, or at least some romanticized version of it.Įvery game allows for a new combination of building types.įortunately, this process is tougher than it sounds. Oh, and this is all done simultaneously, with no significant downtime other than harassing whichever of your friends is taking too long deciding where to stash their glass. ![]() ![]() If a bunch of adjacent resources match the design on a building card, you sweep them all up and plop that building into one of the spaces where your resources were arranged. That’s where the differences end, because every mode sees you taking that resource and placing it into an open spot. In the third you’re picking from three resource cards at a time, but also playing solo for a high score. In the second mode the burden of choosing is offloaded to a deck of resource cards. In one mode players switch off being the “master builder,” which basically means they take turns declaring which resource will be placed that turn. You want to build (tiny) buildings on your (tiny) town plot, so you place (tiny) resources into those (tiny) squares, and hope you’ve shown enough foresight to leave (tiny) openings where you can slot new buildings or resources in the future.Īnd it’s both incredibly simple and pleasantly brain-burny. There are three broad ways to play Tiny Towns, but the gist is the same in each. ![]()
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