Verplant & Zugestellt

• Designer: Steffen Hacker
• Publisher: frechverlag
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes per scenario
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Players represent Interior Design companies which have been asked to fill rooms with furniture. Each player has a floor plan of the rooms. On the table, there are sets of cards for each room, with each card showing one piece of furniture. Players take turns flipping over one of the cards and choosing one of the shapes shown on the backside of the card. Then all players have to draw that piece of furniture into their plan, making sure there is enough space for walls, doors and a corridor that connects the rooms. Also, each piece of furniture must be reachable from the door. To ensure this, the furniture shapes also show empty fields that must be adjacent to the furniture. To be able to fit all the furniture into the rooms, players must overlap the empty fields efficiently. When all cards are flipped, players score depending on how much of the furniture they were able to place. The scenario booklet contains several small campaigns with 25 scenarios all in all, with various difficulty levels.

In case you haven’t already translated it – the game title in English is translated to: “Scheduled and Delivered”

To begin, each player takes a worksheet that has the grid for the floor plan on it. A scenario is decided upon and the introduction blurb is read and any setup marks are made on your sheet as directed in the setup.  The scenario will tell you how many room cards need to be laid out, which furniture cards needs to be placed for each room (note there are two different cards for each number, and you should just choose one of them at random), as well as how many “?” furniture markers should be placed on each card – the number of markers tells you how many instances you require of that particular piece of furniture.  Finally, the scenario may give you some hints and tips, and the rules recommend that you read them aloud before beginning.

On a turn, choose a furniture card from the currently active room.  if there is not an active room, the current player picks one – flipping the room card over to denote this. Then any unchosen furniture card is chosen – and on the back side – you’ll find two different options.  The active player places the question mark tokens on either option (if there are multiple tokens, they can go on the same choice), showing which pieces of furniture need to be added to the room.

Once decided, all players now pick up their pens and add the designated pieces of furniture to their diagram. Be sure to keep open spaces in front of your furniture so that it can be accessed!  And, the same open space can be used to access multiple pieces of furniture.  As you are drawing the furniture, you are allowed to rotate it, but you are NOT allowed to mirror it.  (Once you play the game for awhile, you’ll unlock Joker tokens which can be spent to allow you to mirror the piece of furniture OR choose the other option on the card not specified by the question mark token).  You also always have the option not to draw a particular piece of furniture in – but there will likely be scoring consequences if you choose not to draw it in!

If the room is complete – that is, all of the cards in the room have been used, then you draw walls around the furniture to enclose the room.  Each room must have a single door for access.   The next player now goes by choosing a furniture card, starting a new room if the previous one was completed on the last turn.

As you are building your rooms, remember that your house will need a front door and there needs to be a hallway coming from the front door which every other room must be able to access via their doorway.  The front door must be on an exterior wall, but it can be drawn at any time and at any location on the exterior surface.  Furthermore, just like in real life, every piece of furniture must be accessible from the front door – that is, the empty space in front of a piece of furniture must be open to the rest of the room, and in turn, open to the front door.  You don’t climb over a sofa in your room to get to the bookcase!

Continue this process until the house is complete – that is all the cards have been used.  Now, each player scores their house – 

• 1VP for each square on your grid that has accessible furniture in it.
• 0VP for open space
• -3VP If a room has no furniture in it or the room cannot be identified
• Other scoring based on the specific scenario rules

Note that as you progress through the scenario book, you’ll learn new rules and get more scoring opportunities – the rules above reflect the basic rules which you will use in the starting scenarios.  I’ll not spoil the surprise of some of the later rules that come up as you progress through the booklet.

My thoughts on the game

So, I spent most of the year feeling down on Roll and Write (RAW) games as they were all feeling the same.  Then, I went to Essen and picked up a few of them, and I have been pretty happy with them.  Verplant and Zugestellt is not exactly a RAW as there is no rolling (and to some degree, no flipping) – but it shares a lot of the hallmarks of the genre, and at least in my head, I’m putting it in that box.

Here, you get a graph paper sheet and you start with the outline of the house/building/whatever that you’re going to fill.  Then, in each round, you have to add furniture to the room – making sure that you can access everything and trying to cram as much into the fixed space as possible.  

I’m still not quite sure of the theme – is this architecture? Is this interior decoration?  Can it be both? Regardless of the theme, there is a challenging puzzle to be solved in each game.  In general, players have to use the same objects, though the joker tokens allow you to deviate when you need to.  Unlike a RAW, the players get to choose the order of the cards to be used as well as choosing which specific things need to be added to the diagram.  When it’s my turn to choose, I try not to look too much at my opponent’s sheet as I’m usually just worried about being able to fit the largest thing possible into my room (as each occupied space gains you a point).

Rules – so be aware, the rulebook and scenario book in the box are all in German. There are translations available online, and they look great, but be prepared to print out a lot.  I’d recommend printing out the main rulebook and the first few scenarios – and you can go back and print out the others as you need.  The printout is definitely not as cool as the spiral bound book that the original scenarios come in – but it’ll do just fine in a pinch; especially if you have access to a color printer.  You can still use the book as an illustrated example for other players.  I ended up going without a cover because the front and back cover are large single pages on the pdf while everything else comes in a duplex, and I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to make a booklet out of it.  (This is more a failing on my part than anything else).

I’ve played through six or seven scenarios so far, and they have been enjoyable and challenging.  One thing that I’m discovering is that many of the scenarios are probably impossible to completely fulfill – and the trick is figuring out which things you plan to skip or when to use a joker token.  Before I figured it out, I ended up with a house that had no furniture in the bedroom – because I ran out of space!  So, you want to figure out how to cram the most into a room – but also make sure that you can draw reasonable walls around that room and still give it access to your hallway…

frechverlag is a new company to me, and so far, I like what they have to offer.  Their 2024 release plans also look great, and this is a company that I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out on in the future.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (one play): I had the chance to try this at Essen, thanks to Hilko, and – it’s a clever game.  But while it might not be a traditional roll/flip-and-write, it’s still evocative of the genre, and I’m too burned out on the genre to get much beyond “clever game, would play again”.  It also doesn’t help that Rand introduced me to a similar-in-concept game, Madrino, where the scoring system is just the will of the players.  Both games have their place; I have a slight preference for Madrino, but I expect most gamers will prefer Verplant & Zugestellt.

Mark Jackson (two plays): This is not “just like every other flip-n-write” – not only do players have some agency in choosing what elements on each card are used by all players at the table, but the creative problems those choices create are more than “check off some boxes”. Verplant & Zugestellt is about interior design – you are attempting to create a home that satisfies the owner’s desires… and learning to let go of some requests is key to building a successful layout. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Mark Jackson
• Neutral. Joe H.
• Not for me…