OddVille

EvEvanstar3,5

The components consist of some meeples & player cards, a resource board and some cards representing city locations. On your turn, you either play this multi-use card and do one of the three things on it, or you build a building which will score for you at the end, based on whatever criteria the building has printed on it. When you are out of cards to play, you reset your hand, or you can reset sooner if you are willing to pay for the cards you didn't play. The resource board system is clever and efficient and makes for some interesting tension in grabbing up the cheap resources when they become available. The need to grab good buildings when they become available vs your limited ability to hold unbuilt buildings is delightful. Figuring out how to place your buildings into the city using carcassonne rules of placement, where roads need to lead to roads and cities need to connect to cities is interesting. There are nice little combos where you get benefits of the building when you build it and also the benefits of all city cards connected to your new one by a road. The big failing of the game are the special ability cards that get handed back and forth become more swingy in terms of point values and power level. Your ability to get them is very dependent on what cards are in the available belt, which isn't something you have a lot of control over, and the game ends immediately when a player places however many claim markers in the city, so you can be going toe to toe with someone and then they construct their last building for 4 points, and then steal your 7 point ability card, and then that's the game, with nothing you can do about it. Cute idea for a game, but just not a very enjoyable game overall. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ☆☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment