TINY TOWNS (2019)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
1-6	45-60 mins	Peter McPherson	Alderac Entertainment Group

In this small footprint town building game, players are each a Mayor using limited resources to build a thriving community.

First off I’ll say that the woodland theme of TINY TOWNS doesn’t really come through for me. I never feel like I’m anything more than a person building my town.

But this in no way ruins the game as what is left is a fun little puzzle that, like CALICO, goes from bountiful space and freedom to tight, frustrating decisions in just a few minutes.

Each turn a player picks one of the five resources and all other players must take the same.

This is where the chaos steps in. Not all players will want the same thing on the same turn. So what do you do if it’s something you don’t need? Well, you’ll have to place it somewhere else on your board for now and come back to that later.

Except your building space is only 4×4, meaning that ‘over there’ isn’t very far away.

When your placed blocks match a building’s floorplan, you remove all the blocks and place the corresponding building on one of the squares the resources occupied.

This is your opportunity to tidy up a bit. It may have taken five cubes, but the completed building only needs one square, so you’ve got space back.

However, there’s more to the puzzle.

Buildings have scoring conditions, and a fair few of them require specific placement next to others.

So, as the game goes on, placement decisions get tougher and tougher.

TINY TOWNS is a fun little game, one that doesn’t take long to play despite its crunchy resource placement.

It most definitely shines at higher counts, with more conflict involved in a 4-player game when you’ve got three potentially unwanted resources coming your way before your next turn.

There’s also a lot of replayability in the box with various floorplan cards for each building.

Overall, TINY TOWNS is a cute, colourful, town building game that is more of a mental work out than it seems at first glance.