Tiny Towns: Fortune

• Designers: Peter McPherson, Josh Wood
• Publisher: AEG
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 12+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4v81EC8
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The smaller creatures of the forest have created a civilization free of predators, and they look to you as mayor to guide their growing and thriving town. However, the area is small, and resources are scarce. The clever use of limited resources will determine the most successful tiny town.

In the expansion Tiny Towns: Fortune, the creatures of the forest have found a way to trick each other into thinking shiny bits of metal have arbitrary value. It’s very useful — so much so that you can use this thing called “money” to get other creatures to give you almost anything in return for the right number of shiny bits. If only earning money weren’t so difficult!

Tiny Towns: Fortune is an expansion to the 2019 release, Tiny Towns.  In short, you are the mayor of a tiny town in the forest in which the smaller creatures of the woods have created a civilization hidden away from predators. This new land is small and the resources are scarce, so you take what you can get and never say no to building materials. Cleverly plan and construct a thriving town, and don’t let it fill up with wasted resources! Whoever builds the most prosperous tiny town wins!  In Tiny Towns, your town is represented by a 4×4 grid on which you will place resource cubes in specific layouts to construct buildings. Each building scores victory points (VPs) in a unique way. When no player can place any more resources or construct any buildings, the game ends, and any squares without a building are worth -1 VP. The player with the most VP wins!

If you are unfamiliar with the game, you can read access our review here: 

https://opinionatedgamers.com/2019/06/16/tiny-towns-game-review-by-brandon-kempf/

In the Fortune Expansion, the big change here is the addition of coins!  Players each get a treasure chest that can hold up to four coins.  These coins can be worth VP at the end of the game, but they can also be spent along the way for all sorts of things. 

The main way to acquire coins is through building multiple buildings on a single turn.  Each time that you do this, you gain a coin from the supply.  The expansion also comes with its own set of building cards, and while you are only recommended to use 4 or fewer of these at a time, many of these new buildings also provide you with ways to generate coins upon their construction.

How do you use the coins?  In the short term, a coin can always be spent to ignore the color choice of the active player and allow you to place a cube of any color you like.   Many of the buildings provide special optional actions that can be triggered with coin spending – most notable are the feeding buildings.  If you have coins left over at the end of the game, they are also worth 1 VP each.  The expansion does come with a new score pad so that you can track the points from coins, but honestly, you can just get by with the original – and now you have a full space score pad for your base Tiny Towns!  The monuments in this set also tend to involve the use of coins, and they add an interesting set of choices to the game.  

When you play with this expansion, I think that the number of Fortune cards that you choose to use will determine how influential the coins are.  If you only have one or two Fortune buildings, you might simply be able to ignore the coins altogether…  (Though, having a coin or two to allow you to substitute a color choice can be super useful).

Tiny Towns: Fortune is a great addition to the game system, and you can easily add this into your games.  It also works with Tiny Towns: Villagers if you want to have an even more varied experience.  All of the expansion cards are marked in the lower right corner so that you can easily separate the components.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark Jackson: Of the two expansions, I like Fortune better – and usually set it up to require 1-2 Fortune expansion buildings in the mix. (As Dale points out, if you don’t have Fortune buildings, the money system is less helpful.)

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4v81EC8