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Within the beautiful archipelago area of the North Italian city of Venice lies a colourful island by the name of Burano. A busy tourist spot, each and every house is vibrantly painted in shades of pink, green and blue, and a vast number of pizzerias, coffee shops and lace clothing boutiques reside on streets roamed by cats and split in two by boat-filled canals. A fascinating setting for a board game, is it not?
Walking in Burano is a 20-40-minute board game for 1-4 players developed by Wei-Min Ling and published by the Taiwanese publisher EmperorS4, who are best known for introducing the formidable two-player game Hanamikoji to the world.
The aim of the game is to complete five three-storey houses on your street in order to attract a variety of tourists and inhabitants to your venues, with each offering their own bonus scoring criteria at the end of the game.
The game has elements of set collection and drafting while developing into a point salad that Caesar himself would be proud of. They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day; will you and your opponents be able to build Burano in less than an hour?
The Beauty of Burano
It would be unfair to start discussing this game without talking about the incredibly pretty aesthetics that Walking in Burano has to offer. Maisherly Chan, who was also responsible for the art design of Hanamikoji, returns to deliver a fantastic production and manages to bring the exotic atmosphere of Burano to the game table.
The game’s overall colour palette stays true to its source material with vibrant shades, and the variety of shops and tourists are well-represented and have a lot of charm to them. It’s also worth noting that cat lovers will find plenty to like regarding the game’s production; cats appear on a large number of the floor tiles in the game, and the game even goes as far as using a cat as the first player token.
The Merchants of Venice
It’s a good job that the game’s aesthetic qualities shine through, as they play a huge role in the game mechanics. During a round, each player will take one, two or all three floor cards from one of the available columns in the middle of the table and obtain coins depending on how many cards they took. These coins can then be used to build floor cards on your street, with leftover coins and floor cards staying in your reserve.
Players start the game with two scaffold cards, which can be used as temporary placeholders if the second and third floors are built but not the first, for example. Each floor card has a number of tourists, flowerpots, cats and other features that will play an important role in deciding which card to pick, as planning ahead and choosing them wisely is vital to scoring well.
Each of the floors in a house must be of the same colour, and no two adjacent houses can have the same colour either. However, each player starts with four tokens, worth three victory points (VP) at the end of the game, that can be traded in to break either (or both) of those two rules. Once a house is complete, you get to choose either a tourist or an inhabitant that remains underneath your house until the end of the game.
Tourists give points depending on the criteria your house meets (for example, the Girl tourist gives three VP for each cat that appears on all three of the house’s floors) and are themselves worth two VP, while Inhabitants care about all five of your houses at the end of the game (Santa Claus, in what I consider to be beautiful flavour, gives you three VP for every chimney on all of your five houses at the end of the game). You can only have one of each Inhabitant on your street, but multiples of Tourists are allowed.
The Complexity of an Italian Espresso
Let’s get something out of the way: Walking in Burano is a deceptively thinky game. Beneath the game’s relatively small box and cute aesthetics is a surprising amount of intense decision-making, as you’re forced to decide whether you want to grab fewer floor tiles and save up money for future rounds or take a risk and complete your houses as soon as possible.
Things get even more interesting thanks to the variety of tourists and inhabitants; tourists seem like the easiest way to get points at first, but if you can successfully plan the layout of your street, some of the inhabitants can be worth more points overall.
Sometimes you’ll be forced to forgo one of your three VP tokens in order to break a rule just so you can finish a house and get a tourist/inhabitant, but it isn’t always immediately obvious if it’s the correct play or not. Some floor tiles also have bordered-up windows featured on them, and the player with the most of these at the end of the game loses points equal to the amount they have, so it’s something you constantly have to keep in mind as well.
While you won’t find yourself interacting with other players in this game, there is still the potential to observe what your opponents are building and decide what to take accordingly, as your decisions could impact what another player does on their turn. This is definitely a game that makes more sense and ‘clicks’ as the game progresses; if you’ve ever played 7 Wonders, chances are you know how that feeling goes.
Final Thoughts on Walking in Burano
Walking in Burano offers an impressive amount of gameplay, aesthetic value and depth relative to its size and cost. No two streets that you build will ever be the same, and once you get used to the process of choosing and building, the game flows at a steady pace while demanding some intense decision-making.
The theme and artistic quality is going to appeal to a very large demographic and is most definitely an asset when it comes to convincing your friends and family to play this game, however it will require a slight amount of patience to overcome the initial confusion during the first couple rounds.
Due to the game’s overall charm, it’s not difficult for me to recommend this game to pretty much any playgroup.
