FOUR WINNERS!
New board games have multiplied over the years, with thousands of new titles coming out every season — and that was pre-pandemic. Now we’re all board game obsessives. And while Monopoly still retains its, well, near monopoly on the board game market, there are about a zillion other choices. Released within the last couple of years, these board games are definite contenders for a lockdown game night. After all, who can resist a game that lets you design your own City of Light, channel your inner Eichler or solve a museum mystery? And three of them can be played by just one or two people.
Tiny Towns
Between its premise — you’re the mayor of a tiny town populated by adorable woodland creatures — and the cute little wooden building blocks, you might mistake this for a children’s game. It’s not.
Released in 2019, the game is aimed at ages
14-plus, and its strategic elements will test your urban planning and Tetris capabilities to the max.
Those itty-bitty wooden cubes represent the resources you’ll need to build cozy cottages, and the bucolic farms, orchards or granaries to feed the hedgehogs, squirrels and other woodland inhabitants. Draw building cards to determine which types of structures — taverns, chapels, theaters, monuments — are destined for your town’s four-by-four grid, then start building with the resources specified by the master builders (players) each turn.
Each Tetris-shaped building has its own resource requirements — glass, brick and straw for an L-shaped cottage, for instance, and stone and wood for a well — and scoring specifics. Cottages need to be near a food source to accrue points, for example, but whether the little houses can be placed at will depends on whether you drew a farm, orchard or greenhouse card. And while one tavern is worth two points, five pubs are worth 20. (Considering that’s basically one tavern per cottage, we’re concerned about those hard-partying hedgehogs.)
GOOD TO KNOW >> The Town Hall Rules variation in the back of the rulebook calls for a randomly shuffled deck of resource cards and transforms this game from fun romp into major challenge. When players dictate the resources, you know there will be plenty of variety and many calls for glass, brick and straw cubes; everyone needs to build cottages. Use randomly plucked resource cards instead and all bets are off. You could end up with no glass or brick, just stone after stone after stone. That’s excellent news for a well digger run amok; unhappy news for builders watching their potential cottage lots overwhelmed by masonry.
DETAILS >> Designed by Peter Mcpherson for Alderac Enterainment Group, Tiny Towns ($40) is designed for one to six players, ages 14 and up. It takes about 45 minutes to play.
Paris, La Cite de la Lumiere
It’s 1889 and the electricity introduced at Paris’ Exposition Universelle has transformed the city’s famous gas streetlights into an astonishing spectacle. Now it’s up to you, oh creative builder and master planner, to design an illuminated cityscape in this 2019 game, where the playing board is part of the box.
Taking turns, you’ll pave the city with cobblestone squares, with some spaces reserved only for you (orange), some for your partner (blue) and some open to either of you (purple). Construct buildings — simple L-shapes, grand Ts and other geometric shapes — on your squares, but make sure your buildings are illuminated by as many street lamps as possible.
Special Parisian “postcards” grant extra powers: You can add an extra streetlight or building annex, cover your opponent’s space with a cobblestone square of your own or drop a painter into the mix to capture the star-struck city and net you extra points.
GOOE TO RNOW >> Pour some Champagne! Reminiscing about lovely Paris as you sip bubbly will make you feel better about the difficulty of getting all six of your buildings on the board.
EHTAILS>> Created by José Antonio Abascal Acebo for Kosmos, Paris, La Cite de la Lumiere ($27) is designed for two players, ages 8 and up, and takes 30 minutes to play.
Exit — The Game: The Mysterious Museum
Kosmos’ escape-room-in-a-box games seized attention when the first trio — The Secret Lab, The Pharaoh’s Tomb and The Abandoned Cabin — snagged the Kennerspiel des Jahres prize in 2017. Now there are more than a dozen of varying degrees of difficulty. We’ve played five or six different Exit games by now, and this intermediate-level, science museum-inspired version, released last year, is one of our favorites, partly for its speed of launch.
The games all follow a similar format: There’s no game board. You’re given a small booklet with images, a decoder disc and three sets of cards bearing riddles, clues and answers. There are additional oddities in or on the box, like an optical illusion you have to put together or a strange marker. And there’s a story — about a haunted mansion, perhaps, a polar expedition gone awry or, in this case, a strange museum exhibit on Christopher Columbus’ flagship.
It’s up to you to solve the mysteries — including how to start the game in the first place — as well as decipher the codes and escape the box, using just your wits, a pair of scissors and some out-of-the-box thinking. Along the way you’ll fold, spindle and mutilate the booklet and several cards, so it’s not a replayable game.
GOOE TO RNOW >> The Mysterious Museum is ranked intermediate and its puzzles certainly are, but we found the game one of the easiest for newbies to tackle. You may spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to start some of the other games — Dead Man on the Orient Express, we’re looking at you — but with this one, you know what to do first almost from the get-go.
EHTAILS>> Created by Inka and Markus Brand for Kosmos, Escape — The Game: The Mysterious Museum ($15) is designed for one to four players, ages 10-plus, and takes one to two hours to play.
Welcome to Your Perfect Home
We are besotted with midcentury modern style — and roll-and-write games, where a dice roll or card flip has players marking up their paper (or wipe-off) game board. Released in 2018, Welcome to Your Perfect Home is both, a creative game that casts players as architects designing the perfect 1950s-style subdivision. We’re no Eichler or Frey, but designing a paper Palm Springs-esque neighborhood, brimming with palm trees and midcentury-mod appeal, is all kinds of fun.
The “game board” is an 8-inch square notepad; you tear off color maps of a three-block neighborhood to play. Each block holds 10 to 12 houses — some preapproved for kidney-shaped pools — and city planning cards with goals, like a set of four homes set apart by a privacy wall. Randomly shuffled construction cards assign building projects — a house with a pool, perhaps, or a park nearby — and house numbers you add to one of the blocks in ascending order, a feat that can be trickier than it appears.
GOOE TO RNOW >> The “bis” action card lets you clone a house, so you can have two House No. 3s next to each other, but you lose points in the process. In some cases, it’s definitely worth it. Do it too much, though, and you will lose.
EHTAILS>> Created by Benoit Turpin for Deep Water Games, Welcome to Your Perfect Home ($35) is designed for 1 to 100 players, ages 10plus. It takes about half an hour to play.