Welcome to your Perfect Home was first released by Blue Cocker Games – a French board game publisher. Luckily, some die-hard fans of the roll and write genre got hold of a copy by importing it and told the world about its awesome-ness.
Roll and writes are typically games where you roll dice and write something on a printed pad of paper based on the results – Yahtzee being the most classic example. Welcome To actually has no dice – it instead has decks of cards, so we’ve been calling it a ‘flip and fill’.
Fortunately, Welcome to your Perfect Home gained enough attention to be picked up by Deep Water Games for wider distribution and they will be bringing and extended version to Kickstarter in the coming months, to even further widen the reach of this very popular game.
Welcome to your Perfect Home Gameplay
Welcome To is a game for 1-99 players. Why 99? Technically the player count is limited, because each turn, all players will be given the same choices to pick from to add to their player sheet. Each player has a player sheet depicting a neighbourhood full of houses with no numbers on the doors. Over the course of the game you have to add numbers to the houses so that they are in ascending order.
Each turn the decks of cards will reveal three combinations of one house number and one action, and all players select one pair to use. House numbers range from 1-15 and you can write the house number in anywhere on your player sheet, which is arranged in three streets, so long as you obey the ascending numbers rule.
You also get the corresponding power, which might allow you to add a tree to the street, or a pool to the house you just numbered. Your power might allow you to draw a fence to create smaller groups of houses which are good for end game points. Or you might be able to modify the house number value to better fit it into the spaces available on your sheet.
As you fill up your player sheet, it will become harder to place some numbers and the end game can be triggered if anyone fails to write in a house number three times. The other end game trigger is if one layer completes all three bonus cards by creating specific plots with the right number of houses. Points are available in many ways based on bonuses you took or objectives that you achieved, but the player with the most points wins.
Amy's Final Thoughts
While technically not a roll and write game, Welcome to your Perfect Home certainly still falls into this genre, all that’s missing is the sound of dice rolling! Letting everyone play at the same time means you are never bored, but with three choices a round you a guaranteed to play differently from everyone else at the table, at least after a turn or two!
By its very nature Welcome To is a meticulously fair game, while there certainly can feel like there’s an element of luck, ultimately the same ratios of numbers will appear over the game and every player gets the exact same opportunities. Of course, as players diverge the numbers and abilities they want to come up varies, but the feeling of fairness remains - only you are responsible for the situation you are in. Combine that vast amount of choice, with naming your town at the start of the game and you get a real personal connection with your player board throughout the game.
Welcome To is a wonderfully simple game, it’s easy enough for nearly anyone to pick up, and yet has enough depth to it to keep gamers interested. It’s a game that I will happily take with me to any group of people and be assured of a good time!
Fiona's Final Thoughts
We jumped on the Welcome To bandwagon pretty early, and we still haven’t got off it! It’s been a great game to play with just two players, but we’ve also introduced it to different groups of friends, some of which have very limited experience with modern games.
What sets Welcome to your Perfect Home apart from a number of the early roll and write games is the theme. No longer are you just rolling dice to fill out numbers on a board in quite an abstract way, you now have a full colour board where you’re developing a town you can be proud of. Just the simple act of letting player’s name their town is one that really gets new players into the game.
Underneath the theme, the game is actually not that mechanically dissimilar to something like Qwinto, where you must assign your numbers in order on different rows, but the addition of the special ability cards it what really makes this a game with a lot more longevity for us than a simple roll and write. Each game I find that we pursue different strategies based on focusing on swimming pools or trees, for example. I particularly enjoy the goal cards that drive me towards investment in certain sizes of land parcels, which really gives me a structure to the game.
Welcome to is one of absolute favourite games in this genre and I would recommend it for almost any occasion, for almost any group. It’s flexibility for group size and its accessibility are huge plus points for getting Welcome To onto our table.