Tiny Towns: Fortune

Tiny Towns Fortune

Tiny Towns from AEG is a fantastic game combining planning with a level of spacial awareness. Each player will take a four by four grid with which to build their town. This is done by laying out some recipe cards as I like to call them! Each card tells you how to build one of the building types, and what that building will do for you. This is mainly ways of scoring but there are also some buildings that will give you other abilities.

The ‘recipes’ are patterns of coloured cubes that you will be placing one at a time on to your board. Make the required pattern in any orientation and you can build that building on one of the squares you used for the recipe. The colour of the cubes you will use can be select in one of two ways. Either use the included deck or cards or take turns as players to choose the colours you want.

The Fortunes expansion adds a new buildings and monuments. Monuments are a type of building that only you can build. There were some included in the base game and now you have loads more! The main think fortune adds though is Treasure! To get a gold coin you need to build two buildings in the same turn, or a building that rewards you with it. You can only store up to four gold at anyone time, but thankfully there are some great uses for it. Firstly you can spend one gold to change the colour of a block as you take it. Then some buildings require gold to be spent to actually build them. Finally any gold you have left is worth one point at the end of the game.

This expansion does what every good expansion does adds more stuff and an extra that is super easy to use in games.

Player count: 1-6
Time: 45-60 minutes
Age rating: 14+

BLOG

The tiny woodland creatures are back and are happy with just building inns, cathedrals, factories and a whole host of other buildings. They have come up with a way to trick there fellow creatures with shiny bits of metal that they are calling “money”. This “money” can you get almost anything from the other creatures, all you they need to do is trade in a few bits of the shiny metal.

Fortune is the first expansion to the very popular 2019 release Tiny Towns. Fortune introduces coins, new buildings and new monuments. These coins can be gained by constructing two or more buildings in a single round. Players can store up to four coins on their coin chest board. The coins are worth one point each at the end of the game but you can also pay one coin to place a different resource than the resource named by the Master Builder.

The new buildings all have different actions and abilities that play with the new coin resource. Apart from that the main rules from the base game apply and the game plays in a similar manner.

Expanding your Coffers

Tiny Towns was a massive hit in 2019. It was one of my most played games in 2019. So, is the introduction of “coins” in to Tiny Towns a way to part with your own shiny bits of metal or is this expansion worth the investment? Read on to find out more.

I love Tiny Towns, I love the simple ruleset and the variability in the buildings that you have. I have taught this to so many people and it has always gone down very well. So when I got the chance to review the expansion I was very excited.

What Fortune does is give players more of the good stuff. Firstly, it offers more ways to score points with new buildings and the coins themselves. It offers more replay-ability and scope for different combinations from game to game. It offers more “game”. Yet, it doesn’t increase the rules complexity and it doesn’t increase the game length. I would quite happily incorporate the expansion in to the base game and teach it to new people without any concerns.

The introduction of the coins gives you more flexibility with respect to the resources you gain (as you can spend one to change the gained resource type). However, it offers more of a spatial challenge as you want to hold off constructing buildings till you have two (so you can gain an extra coin). The extra “resource” offers new levels of tension. Do you spend the coins to gain a different resource, do you construct a building now or wait till you have two, do you keep your coins for points. The new buildings are interesting and varied and give you different paths to pursue. The new buildings seem well balanced and integrate with the buildings from the base game very well.

It is a fantastic expansion and an expansion that I highly recommend.

If you liked Tiny Towns and want more then Fortune is a must buy.