The Grand Carnival Board Game

It’s that time of year again – the carnivals have arrived in Littleton and each one wants to be the biggest and best in town. Set in the summer of 1937, guests can expect to be entertained by the house of mirrors, dodgems, fire breathers and more. As the manager of one of the carnivals, it’s your job to be the best at the Grand Carnival!

Set Up

Place the railyard board within reach of all the players, and place the foundation tiles in two face-down stacks in the ‘1’ carriages. From these, draw a tile for each of the carriages labelled 2 -5 and place them face-up. The white tent is the round-marker and starts the game on the space marked Sunday.

Next, shuffle the Tricks of the Trade cards and deal 3 face-up so that all the players can see them. The remainder won’t be needed this game.

Randomly select a number of attraction tiles of each size and place them on the table. Don’t stack them, as you’ll need to see which shapes are left throughout the game. If two of you are playing, use five of each size, for three players you’ll need six and for four players eight of each size.

Make a pile of tickets, a pile of purple guest pawns, and a pile of barkers. The number of barkers is again dependent upon the player count: five for two players, six for three players and eight for four.

The starting player token is a gold carousel horse and should be given to the last player who went to a carnival (or fairground, or school fete). Don’t stress too much over this as it really makes very little difference who goes first.

Each player chooses a player board, which they place in front of them. Take the eight corresponding action pawns and place five of these next to the action spaces labelled 1 – 5 on the left of the player board. The other three may be needed later if you earn the right to use tricks of the trade.

Place a purple guest on each of the two entry spaces on your board.

Turns

On your very first turn there is really only one option available to you and that is to place a foundation tile. The tile you take is governed by the action number you move a pawn onto. So, if you use action space ‘5’, you can take any tile, from carriage 5 down to 1. If you move onto action space ‘3’, you can choose a tile from the 3, 2 or 1 space. And so on.

If tiles are taken from face-up spaces, those remaining are moved left and a new tile is placed onto space 5 for the next person’s turn. If you used the 1 action space and took a face-down tile, you can opt to remove all the face-up foundation tiles from the railyard and

replenish from the stacks. If the stacks ever run out, simply shuffle the discarded ones and make new stacks.

Your new foundation tile can be placed anywhere on your player board, but any mallets on it must be the right way up ie you cannot rotate the foundation tiles. Bear in mind that the mallet squares are construction sites, on which you will be able to build attractions later, and the green squares are grass walkways, enabling guests at your carnival to move around and visit those attractions. You may also be thinking about how to achieve those tricks of the trade already.

After each person’s very first go, you will have three actions to choose from on your turn:

• Place a foundation tile as before.
• Take and place an attraction. Again, the number you choose for this turns action will dictate which size of attraction you can take. As the round progresses, and you have used some of the action spaces for other turns, your choices become more limited. If you choose action space ‘2’ for taking an attraction, you can only select one that covers 2 squares or 1. Then place your chosen attraction on foundation tiles on the board. The attraction tiles can be rotated and flipped over, but they must not be outside the original 4×4 board, nor must they overlap the large foundation squares, or grass walkways. You may only take one attraction on your turn, for example, if you are using the ‘4’ action space, you cannot take two attractions of size 1 and 3.
• Move a guest. You can use a pawn’s action space to move a guest the equivalent number of spaces onto and through your carnival grounds along the walkways. When the guest ends up next to one or more attractions you’ve already built, add one ticket to each of those attractions. Each attraction can hold the same number of tickets as squares it covers eg a size 4 attraction can hold up to four tickets. Note that ending a turn diagonally adjacent to an attraction does not allow you to place a ticket on it. More on guest movement later.

Once all players have used up their five action spaces, move the round-marker to the next day of the week and replace the action pawns at the side of your player board ready for the next round.

Tricks Of The Trade

Each of these cards is divided into two halves. The top half tells you what you need to achieve in order to gain the benefit depicted on the bottom half. For example, once you have five tickets on your attractions, you may place tickets on diagonally adjacent attractions to a guest after movement.

Once you have achieved the requirements to use a trick of the trade, place one of your spare action pawns on the card. Each other player now has only one more turn to achieve it themselves, or they forfeit the chance to achieve it for the whole game.

More About Moving Guests

Guests may only move on grass walkways, and may not move through a square occupied by another guest or a barker. They can’t move diagonally.

At any point when both your entry spaces are empty because you have moved both guests into the carnival, place a new guest into each of them. You can now add a barker to one of the walkway squares in your carnival. Careful here, as you don’t want to block access for guests, but tucked away in a corner, barkers will benefit you. For each barker in your carnival, you may move guests one extra space if you choose that action.

If you manage to move a guest through the fairground and into the big top, they stay there for the remainder of the game and are worth points when the scores are added up.

The End Of The Game

After Saturday, the carnivals pack up and move on, but work out how well you scored first!

The player boards have a very useful scoring summary, so that you don’t forget what you are aiming at during the game. This is certainly worth checking every now and again, as it’s easy to forget something (mainly tickets).

You are awarded points for sets of three or more attractions of the same size, as long as each one has a ticket. The bigger the set, and the larger the attractions in it, the more points you get. You also get 22 points for having at least one attraction of each size, and again, these all need tickets.

If you have fifteen or more tickets, you gain 12 points.

There are points available for each barker in your carnival, and for each guest that made it all the way to the big top.

A point is subtracted for every visible construction mallet, large or small.

Add up your scores and see whose carnival was the grandest!

Finally

This is a fantastic game in which you always need to be thinking about which action space to use for which action, which scoring opportunities you want to prioritise and what your opponents are doing. Have fun but be warned – Grand Carnival is addictive!

This is only the third game I’ve tried solo. It feels far too indulgent under normal circumstances but I found myself an excuse (research for this blog). The Grand Carnival is in my top three games. It has been since I first played it. I never get bored with it. I just always get that feeling that one more go would have been all I needed for perfection, but even so, when things go well it’s super satisfying!

Set-up is fairly quick and easy. Simply prepare your player board and the railyard board as normal, and pile tickets and guests nearby. For a one player game, you only need three carnival barkers and three attractions of each size. Three Tricks of the Trade cards are dealt face up, as for a normal game.

While you are playing, the rules are pretty much the same as usual, the only difference to each round being that you must clear and replenish the railyard each time you start a new day at the carnival.

It does feel different while you’re playing though. No longer are you desperately hoping your opponent hasn’t noticed which attraction you are building foundations for. There’s no need to grab it before anyone else does. Nor are you trying to keep up with your opponents as they work towards completing the tricks of the trade. The opportunity to gain the benefits these offer is limited though. The left-most trick is removed if you haven’t achieved it at the end of the second round, the middle one is unobtainable after the third round, and the right hand one must be achieved by the end of the fourth round, or not at all. But there is a nice relaxed feeling to this game solo. You can take your time, nobody else is trying to scupper your plans!

Scoring is very different, but easy to understand and easy to add up at the end: you get a point for each carnival barker, each trick of the trade completed and each guest in the big top. If you manage to build any sets of three attractions of the same size, each set is worth a point, as long as they all have tickets. You also score a point for every attraction that has two or more tickets.

Doesn’t sound too difficult. But wait – you lose a point for every construction site showing. You must also strive to build at least two attractions of each size and get tickets on them. If you only manage one ticketed attraction of a particular size, you lose two points. If you haven’t even got one, lose four points.

Might be a challenge then but it all seemed fairly straightforward so I launched into my first game feeling like I had a good chance of a middling score at least. The designers suggest you have ‘won’ if you score more than zero but there are ascending categories of up to 12 + points.

The Tricks of the Trade I drew were:

‘Practise your Ballyhoo’, which allows you to move guests diagonally. This is a useful ability but it’s not easy to get two guests past the halfway point in the first two rounds, so I gave up on that quite quickly.

‘The Big Draw’. This allows you to move on construction sites but it’s not one of my favoured abilities and I intended to cover up construction sites so I deemed it less useful.

‘Posters Around Town’. This allows you to peek at the topmost face-down tiles, effectively giving you an extra two to choose from. This is one of my preferred tricks of the trade so I resolved to achieve it as soon as possible.

I found it easy to play the solo game. I didn’t have to check the rulebook once, which isn’t always the case in solo modes, even when you know the multi-player really well. There were only my own turns to worry about – no invisible opponent or automa to make moves for. There are no confusing rules and I didn’t lose track of what I was doing or which turn I was on once (which can easily happen to me!)

At the end of my first game, I had scored:

2 for 2 barkers

1 for the Trick of the Trade I achieved

0 for guests in the big top

1 for a group of three same-sized attractions

4 for attractions with at least 2 tickets

-2 for construction sites showing.

So, a total of 6. On the designers table of how-well-you-did, I had scraped into a lower middling category. Hmmn. Not terrible for a first attempt but surely I could do better – this is a game I play all the time!

I looked again at the scoring criteria and realised there were some lessons to be learned. I’d been prioritising objectives that weren’t as important as they are in the multi-player game. I won’t spoil your learning experience by telling you how I changed strategy for the next time.

I decided to use the same Tricks of the Trade because I think the advantages these offer you can make a big difference and I wanted to beat my below average score under the same conditions. This time I got 9 points, which promoted me to the ‘revered’ rather than ‘honoured’ category.

By now I couldn’t really justify a third game – I had enough experience for this article but I was enjoying myself and so I dealt three new Tricks of the Trade and tried again. Another score of 9. It still feels like I’m a long way from ‘Legendary’, which requires a score of 12 or more.

Conclusion – as in the multi-player game, the balance in terms of difficulty is perfect. The scoring is very different, and this requires you to employ new strategies to maximise your points. At the end of the game you feel satisfied as you survey your fairground creation, and yet there’s always the sneaking suspicion you could have done a bit better. Hence why I played three times rather than once before starting on this article. And now I’m going to have another go!