Tiny Towns

Tiny Towns is one of those small games that has everyone leaning over their own little city before they have noticed the room go quiet. It looks clean and modest, and the premise is easy to grasp, but there is enough tucked beneath the colours and shapes to make it more than a pleasant exercise in building a town.

I build my city by placing coloured pieces on a personal board, trying to arrange them into the right patterns for buildings. It is immediate: children can engage with the colours and shapes, while the rest of us soon start treating every spare square as a future emergency.

The important part is that no one chooses material for themselves alone. A colour selected goes into every player's city, so I can advance my own plan or hand someone else precisely the thing they did not need. Before long, I am not merely studying my buildings; I am watching the boards opposite, waiting for the colour that will spoil a corner. That is where it starts to bite.

At four or five players, the game finds the cheerful panic that suits it best. Someone picks a colour that wrecks your carefully arranged plan; you smile as though it is fine, then make sure it is not fine for them on the next choice. I do not find the case for two players especially persuasive. Part of its pleasure is that small, shared disaster.

Tiny Towns is a happy filler with real teeth: simple enough to bring people to the table, and sly enough to keep them there.

Updated session

The later play confirmed the first impression, although three players produced noticeably less panic than four or five. The expansions did not make it to the table, so this view remains firmly about the base game.