Tiny Towns is a box full of that IKEA furniture woody smell, and that’s because it has a huge array of wooden shaped buildings and coloured cubes in it. On top of that you have a couple of decks of cards and some player boards containing a 4x4 grid. Each player starts with their player board empty and a card is dealt for each type of wooden building. The cottage only has one card but the rest of the buildings have four cards each with a different variant and effect on it, giving the game a huge amount of replay-ability and variety. Each card shows what pattern of cubes you need on your board to build that building. So a cottage needs a yellow cube, a blue cube and a red cube, arranged in an ‘L’ shape. The shape can be rotated, mirrored, flipped and so on, but the colours must be in the correct order. The card also gives an effect and/or scoring stipulation that you have to meet to get points. On your turn you will call out a colour of a cube and everyone will add that to their board. If someone has completed a building card pattern they may also build that building by removing the cubes and placing the building on one of the squares a cube was on. Tiny Towns is a game about efficiently planning and using the space available to you. While in the early rounds players may go for the same building types, where they place them varies wildly and therefore the cubes they need start to become different. If you aren’t careful you can quickly narrow down your options and find yourself praying to the board game gods for your opponents to choose a colour your need. For a game that is quite solitaire in nature it’s surprising how dependant on the other players you will become! For those who want a more random or difficult experience instead of players choosing cards there is a deck or 15 cards to randomly choose the cubes for you, with the exception that ever third cube is a free choice. Both ways work really well and Tiny Towns works well at all player counts. Player Count: 1-6Time: 45-60 MinutesAge: 14+
