Tiny Towns is an abstract strategy game with city building as its main focus, where you and up to five other players are building a four by four grid-based town. This town is one that needs to be created in a specific way, which will in turn earn you a bunch of points!
At the start of the game, there are a bunch of town requirements laid out, depending on how experienced you and the other players are in the game. These various requirements tell you how you earn points; you might need a fountain of houses to earn points or enough farms to feed all of the cottages that you create. These types of things are needed when it comes to the structure and how you build up your town in Tiny Towns.
On the four-by-four grid, you are going to be placing little squares. One square goes in each tile, with the aim to create a Tetris-like figure that matches one of the houses on the cards. The rotation itself doesn’t matter, but you need to have the right colors in the right spaces to match the structure you want to build. The block that you are taking from the pile isn’t always up to you. When it is a player’s turn, they will pick a block, and everyone else will need to pick up and place that block onto their grid. When you have a shape that matches a building, you can place that building on one of the squares that your resources required for it are on, and clear out the rest of the resources required back to the resource area on the table.
If your grid fills up, the game ends for you, and you must wait as the rest of your friends continue building up their town until they run out of space as well. At the end of the game, you will hopefully have a village that can be scored in Tiny Towns; and thankfully there are scoring sheets to write down the points you have earned per building, to add them all up.
There is a lot of strategy in this game, to be honest! Placing blocks can quickly go from being an easy thing to being quite challenging; especially when other players pick blocks that you just don’t need, and you are running out of space. If you have any spaces that only have a resource, and not a building, you actually will lose points at the end of the game! So you will need to ensure that you are creating buildings as often as you can, even if the building isn’t as good as you may have wanted.
It is also really hard to see if anyone else is doing better than you in Tiny Towns. Their towns might look really well planned, but until the scoring phase, due to how many different points you get for things that are nearby, you won’t actually know. We had a really good time playing Tiny Towns, however the game itself does take a good chunk of time, especially when it comes to how much thinking needs to be done before placing.
You can purchase Tiny Towns on Amazon.
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