Happy Home Review

Happy Home is a new polyomino tile-placing family game from Alley Cat Games where you are a new home owner. The game is for 2-5 players and takes anywhere between 20-45 minutes (when I played as a 2-player, we finished around the 25-minute mark including scoring)

The aim of the game is go shopping where you will acquire furniture and decorations to place around your home to gain points.

Gameplay is similar to that of Patchwork – so if you enjoy the mechanics of that, this is a lovely addition to your collection. There are also nods to Dungeon Decorators where design objectives are in play for additional end-game points

Looking for your Forever Home?

Time to upgrade the space

This game definitely requires space to spread out the components. If you are short on space (like we were), you can use the box lid to hold all the tiles.

Setup is straight forward and doesn’t take long. The instructions within the box are well written and easy to follow…

Everyone takes their player board containing the house floorplan, their meeple and is shuffled 2-random pieces of ‘starter furniture’ which they then locate the relating tile and place within their home. The remaining cards are then shuffled in with the other item cards.

The Shop board is placed in the middle of the players and meeples placed in order of play (the first player will change each turn) with the remaining slots around the shop filled with face-up item cards.

After selecting on of the 4 ‘design objective’ cards at random, you are ready to begin you decorating journey.

Floorplan…

Once tiles are placed, they CANNOT be moved so you need to think ahead and plan where all your potential furniture and items can fit to maximise your opportunity to score points.

Everyone has the same floorplan which consists of a Living Room, Bedroom, Kitchen and Bathroom. You will go shopping to fill these rooms with selections of furniture, plants and rugs.

Time to Design!

The player at the back of the ‘queue’ always goes first which can sometimes mean you get to collect more than one item (depending on how far ahead around the board the other players are).

Each turn consists of 3 steps : Move, Find item & Place item

1) You can move your meeple to ANY empty space ahead of you and claim the item on the card (if you are on a 2-card space, you can CHOOSE between the 2 which you wish to keep)

2) Locate the polyomino tile matching your card (but you MUST be able to fit it into the room, otherwise you can’t take it)

3) Collect the card and place the tile into the corresponding room – the tile artwork makes this easier as the carpet on the tile matches the board. Certain tiles MUST be placed against walls so make sure you check the card before you collect

At the end of each turn, cards are replaced on the shop board – any discarded or unchosen cards (where all players have passed and not chosen) are DISCARDED and taken out of play for the remainder of the game.

As well as placing furniture and decorations, you should also keep an eye on the COLOURS on the cards as these can count as additional points at end-game.

The design is complete…

Once you can no longer take any of the tiles remaining, you collect a ‘Welcome mat’, remove your meeple from the board and place it in your house. Other payers can continue to collect tiles until they too have collected a Welcome mat.

SCORING – Within the box is a scorecard which will help you keep track of the multiple ways you can score points at end-game. The player boards also have useful notes on the bottom of them to remind players throughout the game as well as a reminder that you can LOSE points for any uncovered scratched on the carpet!

Work your way down the list and tally the scores as you go – the instructions contain breakdowns of how the scoring works for each one – I’ll be honest, the colours one confused us a little when we first played it(!)