Tangram City
- Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
- Publisher: Capstone Games / Korea Board Games
- Players: 1-5
- Age: 8+
- Time: 30 minus
- Played with review copy provided by Capstone Games and OffDutyNinja
As a prestigious city planner, you have been ordered by the queen herself to build a harmonious city. Take care to balance the human and natural realms by creating equal amounts of building (black) and park (green) tiles, and do not forget to incorporate the shape of a rectangle — the shape most important for fortification. Can you build a city worthy of the queen? In Tangram City, players place tangram-shaped tiles in a randomly determined order in a square field while trying to balance the amount of building (black) and park (green) tiles. The more balanced these are and the more often you have built a rectangle shape, the more bonus points players receive.
Josiah’s Round Up March 2024
Josiah Fiscus is one of our newer members, and he writes up a monthly recap of the games he plays. He is planning to repost his thoughts here. Â
March 2024 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.
Lorcana – 4/10 ÂI have been in tune with the Collectible Card Game world almost since the beginning. For my high school senior project, I wrote a paper on the history of CCGs and designed my own (it wasn’t very good!). So if you haven’t been playing and reading about this genre for the past three decades like I have, and instead are a person who simply “likes Disney”, don’t let me yuck your yum. But Lorcana is, in my view, a simplistic, derivative, soulless game that misunderstands what makes CCGs so great.
Magic: The Gathering is, of course, the granddaddy of all CCGs. And really since its inception, there have been people clamoring to remove the variability from its mana (cost) system. The idea of simply playing any card facedown as a mana source, rather than having to draw specific cards that do this, goes back at least 20 years to games like Duel Masters and VS System. And there have been many more since then that have done this as well. Lorcana uses this exact same concept and presents it as innovative. Beyond this, it simply uses the same power/toughness stats and renamed keywords that many other games have already more adroitly copied from Magic.
Absent this context, I might find Lorcana to be merely boring. But the lack of innovation combined with runaway success is frustrating to me, in the same way that the success of Taco Bell must be frustrating to authentic mom-and-pop Mexican restaurants. If you slap Disney branding onto something, it will sell more, that’s just a fact. Never mind the fact that Stitch and Sergeant Tibbs and the Duke of Weselton are all functionally the same card. What a missed opportunity to embrace the flavor of the vast library the designers can pull from!
I’ve only played with the starter decks, so it’s possible that more complex cards do exist that better capture the flavor of the world. It’s also possible that deck building provides challenges that would elevate the mechanics here in my view. But it won’t ever be able to fully escape the insipid nature of its overall design.Â
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