SiliconVania

The Vampire Council is looking to hire a new city planner to turn Transylvania, the most legendary vampire town in the world, into the world's newest tech haven! You and your rivals are competing to land a job that will ask you to create a diverse cityscape for vampire and animal life, provide plenty of blood banks for your citizens, secure contracts, and bring aboard the best specialists in the industry. The race is on to present to the Vampire Council the most organized plans for the city to renovate Transylvania into Siliconvania! In SiliconVania, players bid on building tiles and multi-use specialists that provide either one-time bonuses or end-of-game scoring. Players take the building tiles they win, and place them in their 4x4 city grids, juggling different scoring opportunities, and collecting vampire and pet meeples that are looking for places to live! Each round you: Bid on a pair of building tiles to add to your grid. Be careful as once they're down, they're hard to move. Bid a specialist card for its ability and to get a new specialist card. Cards with stronger bids have weaker abilities, and vice versa. Commit a specialist card for its scoring condition, earning points, but revealing to your opponents which kinds of buildings you really need. The game ends after eight rounds, at which time everyone's city grid will be full. You score points for having each of the seven building types, a wide network of blood banks, and proper housing for the vampire meeples your specialists bring to town. The vampires also want to make sure all this technological advancement doesn't destroy the biodiversity of their home, so you get points for having a variety of animals and animal meeples on your tiles. Your specialists also provide special scoring conditions. Players will also be competing to develop innovations, find artifacts, and build castles and train stations to make their cities even more attractive to the rising vampire population. —description from the publisher

Players: 2–5 best 1
Playing time: 45–90 min
Age: 14+
Complexity: 2.3 / 5