by MrAndMsMeeple

Hi all,

It's hard to believe that as fans of tile placement games we've only played our first Uwe Rosenberg game last year 🙈. But after that first play we were sold and now there's no stopping us from trying more of his games. Next one on the list is Tangram City 🤩. A shorter version of this review can also be found on our Instagram: Mr. & Ms. Meeple - Review - Tangram City.

Tangram City

🗣: Korea Boardgames & Geronimo Games
🧠: Uwe Rosenberg
🎨: Makoto Takami
👥: 1-5
👶: 8+
⏱: 10-40’
⚙️: Grid Coverage, Highest-Lowest Scoring & Tile Placement

Introduction
In Tangram City you're a city planner tasked by the queen with creating a beautiful city for her subjects that showcases harmony between nature and humanity. Are you up to the task?

Finding balance in the end scores you a nice amount of points ⚖️.
How to Play?
Give each player a player board, a Point Marker, a set of 23 double-sided City Tiles, 6 Fountain Tiles and 2 Balance Markers. Shuffle all cards together in a deck to deal out 4 cards in total at the start of each round. Depending on the number of players, these are spread out between players and the middle of the table. Starting with the face-up card in the middle all players simultaneously place the pictured tile, with their preferred colored side face-up, onto their player board to build their city. After all 4 cards have been played each player may place one Fountain Tile onto their player board before counting up their score for their largest built rectangle ⛲. Finally, all players count up their black and green squares and place the accompanying Balance Markers on the right space on their Balance Scale. The player with the highest score will become the start player for the next round. You keep repeating these steps until after 6 rounds the player with the highest score wins 🏆.

Tiles come in all kinds of sizes and shapes 😊.
Manual & Learning the Rules
The last couple of months we've been really enjoying tile placement board games that are easy to learn, teach and bring to the table. Also, most of the time these kinds of games don't have a big manual for you to read which is definitely also the case for Tangram City 📖. We're pretty certain that, since the manual contains only 4 pages, board gamers who don't like manuals also won't find this insurmountable. The only negative we experienced while learning the rules was that there seemed to be missing a bit of information on how to play solo. Luckily we were able to fill in this missing information ourselves with a bit of help from BGG.

Art & Components
We don't have all that much to say in regards to art, components and production except that we like the art style on the tiles which gave us some cartoonish Asian vibes. Also, it reminded me of those old Pokémon games I used to play on my old Game Boy and Game Boy Color which is always a good thing in my book. We felt the style fitted the theme perfectly. Definitely no complaints from us in regards to production 👍.

Does this style also remind you of the old Pokémon video games? 😍
Gameplay
We've probably already said it a million times before, but we really like tile placement games that provide us with an interesting puzzle to solve and we're always up to trying new games like this 🧩. Since we've been playing quite a few tile placement games the past couple of months there is always a chance that these all start to feel the same after while. Luckily, Tangram City does more than enough things differently to have scored a sport in our collection. Now, let us tell you what these things are.

What we liked the most was the fact that Tangram City felt like a different puzzle every time and that this feeling was accomplished by some simple but very effective design choices. Since every player receives the same set of 23 City and 6 Fountain Tiles and you can place these tiles anywhere on your board it would have been easy for Tangram City to start feel repetitive after a few plays. Without anything else to take in account you would be able to solve this puzzle the same way every time and let's be honest, this wouldn't be fun at all 🙈.

How I solved the puzzle the last time 😜.
After 9 plays in about a month we feel the following design choices are the real stars of the show 🌟. First of all you score points after every round for the largest rectangle you've built up until that moment. Now, you can easily decide to ignore this and place your City Tiles wherever you want so you can completely cover your player board by the end of the game. However, we can guarantee this wouldn't be a good idea since your chance to win will be slim to nothing. Furthermore, you also better keep humanity and nature in balance as much as possible because the more your number of black and green squares are balanced the more points you'll score near the end of the game. A perfectly balanced city will score you another 20 points which can be crucial to winning ⚖️. Also, since all City Tiles are double-sided with green squares on one side and black ones on the other, flipping your tile can change its shape which may cause it to be a not-so-perfect fit.

Let's talk about a few more things we liked before moving on to our final conclusion. We also were big fans of the way cards were dealt. For example, when playing at 2 players, 2 cards were dealt to the center of the table with only one being face-up. Furthermore, both players also received a card at which they were allowed to look. This meant you didn't have all information and that information was different for every player, but needed to make decisions based on the information you did have 🤪. A fun addition to Tangram City. Finally, we felt Tangram City is again one of those game that can be played with anyone since it's easy to teach and at the same time plays really quickly due to the fact that players are placing their tiles simultaneously.

There is a rectangle in here somewhere 🤪.
Conclusion
Did we find our inner balance when playing Tangram City?

🧔🏻‍♂️ Mr. & Ms. Meeple 👩🏼
Tangram City was a surprise hit for us. We were intrigued by the tile placement mechanism as it is one of our favorite mechanisms at the moment. We were hoping to like it, but didn't expect to like it this much. It's a game we often brought to the table when we had 30 minutes to spare and were aching for a fun puzzle to solve. A few interesting design choices and mechanisms make sure Tangram City doesn't feel repetitive after a few plays which is really important to us. Definitely a recommendation from us, especially if you like these kinds of board games.

Nature for the win! 🌲
A review copy was provided by Geronimo Games 😊.

Greetings,

Mr. & Ms. Meeple
Wesley & Elke
Instagram - Mr. & Ms. Meeple

Source: View source