by yellowblueplaid

This won't really be a review, but more of a "how did the game feel after a long lull in playing?" We recently revisited the game to consider whether we wanted to keep it in our collection or cull it. In the game you are selecting tiles to populate a personal grid that builds out like a small Roman town, putting tiles together to create different kinds of buildings (that give specific rewards) or landscapes (that give resources). All of this tile-laying contributes to four rounds of scoring, marked by a variable selection of cards that give variety to each game, with other things being scored at end-game.

We have the version of the game with difficult-to-distinguish tile backs, and difficult-to-distinguish yellow and brown buildings (in several cases we had to really double-triple check whether a tile being placed was yellow or brown). Ultimately the amount of set up, and the fiddliness of re-populating the tile market 3 more times at the start of every round, and the amount of fiddliness in the clean up (needing to separate out the tile backs so as to ensure that set up wasn't going to be EVEN MORE fiddly) just added almost as much time to the game as playing the game took.

This is going to be a cull, even though I enjoy the puzzle of populating my city grid and the selecting of scoring goals. If this game was easier to set up and play out i could see it being a game we'd play a couple of times in a row. But as it is I feel completely done with those tiles by the end of one game, even as I found myself curious about putting out different scoring cards and trying again. It's just too much fiddliness for us throughout the game.

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