The Walled City: Londonderry & Borderlands

EvEvanstar4,6

This is a wonderful hour long ish area majorities game where you are cutting up the borders of the areas and adjusting the values while you deploy your markers. At the start of the game the board is filled with colored dice that have numbers 1 to 3. Each color's victory points value is tracked by the sum of those dice. You play two rounds. In round 1 on your turn you play a card from your symmetrical deck and place an area border on the map. Then you use the two numbers on the card to place tokens on the two sides of the border you placed. Then, you can adjust the value of a die in one of the regions you placed into +1 or -1, changing the value for that color across the whole map. In round 2 you do the same process, but you are now placing walls around the edge of the map, as the meeples placed will flush out of areas not completely enclosed before the second round scoring. Before each round players also draft a single powerful ability card they can use any time during their turns, although realistically this is always saved for the final round when players can least respond to it. It's all the area majority elements I love the most in a tidy little package. ★ 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