Socially Distant In TINY TOWNS

Well its been a very odd week indeed. We have kept our daughter home this week from day care all week due to the COVID-19 virus, this means that we were both working from home also. Monday they closed down all the bars and restaurants. Then on Friday our Governor announced a stay at home order for the entire state for two weeks. This led to my wonderful and thoughtful wife to order us up a game from our local game store and that game was Tiny Towns. I know this goes against what I said in January but I think in light of things it seemed like a fine exception.

One of the main reasons Mary thought to get this game was because it can be played single player. With our new daughter and having to work from home she thought it would be nice if I could play a game on my own. Tiny Towns can be played up to six players. I set up Tiny Towns in our temporary workspace in the front window, we have been enjoying the natural light. For a game with tiny in the title it has a lot of pieces. There are eight types of building you can build and then there is also a bag of resource tokens.

The rules for Tiny Towns were very easy to learn. Its a game that's light on rules and heavy on strategy. The game board is a 4x4 grid that you build your tiny town in. This game has you managing the space and resources at the same time all while trying to maximize your points. The single player version is a little different that the multi player version. While playing multiplayer the first player gets to choose what resource is played by all the players. In the single player version you have your choice of three resource cards (as pictured above). I personally liked the space management aspect it gave the game a good degree of difficultly.

Each building you can build is a different requires a different shape on the board with an different amount of spaces needed to build it. I played with the recommended set of first time buildings. You can randomize or pick different buildings for each game, this adds a lot of replay value to the game. In the game I played the Well was the smallest requiring 2 square and my Shrine of the Elder Tree was the largest requiring 6. The resources need to be laid out in the same relative order as on the building card, you can rotate as you would if playing Tetris but they need to remain in order. When a building is has all the resources in the right ordering on the payer board it will only take up one of those squares that the required resources occupied. This is the complexity I enjoyed, as you get into the game you start to think about how you will layer the resources so they can either be used for multiple different buildings or for a building later. You must balance flexibility with managing the space on the board and point values of buildings and their special features.

I thought I was doing much worse when I started out, I was a little overwhelmed trying to plan out my perfect Tiny Town. It didn't go as I planned in my head but It ended well with a score of 43 which made me a Master Architect. So in the end it was a great score. I believe this game will be much harder multi player and can wait to try it out.