Trinidad

Trinidad had been on my list for a long time, and I only managed to find it last week. It is one of those strange, slightly kinky euro city-builders that spreads across the table with confidence and promises a long, satisfying evening. It has many different clever pieces, and that alone makes it interesting to explore.

At its core, it is a city-building game: my choices serve the growth of the city, but they pass through several distinct systems and ideas. It is not a lean, immediate euro; it wants time on the table and gives you room to engage with everything it is trying to do.

As the game goes on, all those clever parts create an experience that is long and fairly full. Player interaction is not what stayed with me most; rather, it was the effort of coordinating the various parts of my own construction and turning them into something that would be rewarded at the end.

And that is exactly where the problem lies: the final scoring did not give me the satisfaction I expected. The game left me with a middling taste, like an unfinished design whose creators could not bear to keep going. I think it would be clearly better with a different scoring system. I would not generally recommend it, unless you too are genuinely tired of more of the same and are looking for something odd to put on the table.