Welcome To Your Perfect Home

Released in 2018, Welcome To Your Perfect Home (also known as Welcome To…) has taken the board gaming world by storm. Benoit Turpin‘s game challenges you to design the best 1950s-era neighborhoods that you can. Welcome To… is suitable for ages 10+ (younger if they’re seasoned gamers), and is published in the U.S. by Deepwater Games.

How to Play

Welcome To… is similar to roll-and-write games. However, instead of rolling dice, you’ll flip cards.

There are three equal stacks of Construction cards. At the beginning of a new round, flip the top card from each of the stacks. The flipped card and the deck it came from create a combination: a number and an effect.

Each player simultaneously chooses one of the three combinations to use on their player sheet.

The number card represents a house on one of your streets, and must be placed in ascending order with the other house numbers on that street. House numbers cannot be duplicated on a single street (except by using the “Bis” effect).

Construction card effects allow you to: build a fence, increase housing estate values, build parks, build pools, duplicate any number on a street, or change the number you’re about to write down.

Build fences between houses, demarcating them into “housing estates”. Create the right sizes of estates to fill the randomly-selected City Plan cards and get points. The first player to complete each City Plan gets a bonus; all other players may still complete the Plan but will receive roughly half as many points when they do.

Game End

The game immediately ends when one of the following things happens:

1. A player has built all three available City Plans.
2. Someone has completely filled the housing spots on all three streets on their player sheet.
3. A player can’t use any of the Construction card combinations and has crossed off the third Permit Refusal on their player sheet.

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Everyone counts up their points (City Plans, parks, pools, temp agency bonus, and estates) and subtracts any points in the “Bis” column and the Permit Refusal column. The player with the most points wins.

Once you’ve learned how to play, add in a few extra challenges: new City Plan cards diversify your goals beyond “housing estates”, and you may now build a “roundabout” to split a street in half, allowing you more freedom in where you place the numbers (but reducing your final score).

Impressions

Several Family Gamers writers have been playing Welcome To Your Perfect Home, so we’re sharing thoughts from each of us.

Anitra:

I like abstract, puzzley games, so I liked the idea of Welcome To…: a game that plays simultaneously and allows for a near-infinite number of players. But I had a really hard time getting it to the table at home. My kids didn’t feel strongly about it, and the solo mode was fine, but not compelling enough to keep me coming back.

I found it more interesting once I began to include the “advanced” City Plans. These change my priorities as I play; I’m no longer simply trying to maximize my “estates”, I’m also trying to get certain pools, or parks, or shift my attention to getting “temp agencies” as quickly as possible.

I love the little details on the number cards; everything from a flag to a thieving racoon on the different front porches. It’s fun to look at the differences, especially if you’re waiting for other players to decide what number to pick.

Nick:

I absolutely love the theme. It jives well with mechanics. We play it a lot, so I’m happy that so many sheets come with it.

We have some of the expansions, and it’s fun to use seasonally-appropriate ones at game nights. I really dig the clever number placement on streets, and the solo puzzle.

Corey:

Welcome To.. is a great game for a large number of people. It would never be my first choice if I had five or fewer at the table though.

The minimum age for this is probably 9-10, but I’ve only played it at work, not with my kids.

The randomization of the objectives cards really helps re-playability. After several playthroughs, the “standard” City Plans start to get a little stale. We now play with at least one advanced Plan every time.

Like most pen and pad games, it suffers from a bit of solitare-itis. I’d like to know more about how other people are doing, but I don’t get much visibility, unless they complete an objective. This is less about strategy and more about just having fun – we’re playing a game together.

The basic mechanic is quite good. I am very glad you get multiple choices, not just one card. However, the good players at work have started to come to common understanding of what the “right” move is in any situation, and we’ve started to have lots of games where people make nearly all the same choices and finish with nearly identical pads. Thus only a couple of choices make the difference in the end.

I would like to see randomization in the pool locations on the streets, but alas, the pads are all the same.

Final Thoughts

We would recommend Welcome To… if you regularly find yourself wanting a game that can play six or more players simultaneously without a lot of time pressure or player interaction. Welcome To… also does well if you want a fun, relatively theme-neutral game to pull out for a larger multi-generational group; perhaps at a family gathering. For smaller groups, there are so many other games available that we wouldn’t reach for this one.

Find Welcome To Your Perfect Home for about $25 at your local game store, on Amazon, or directly from Deep Water Games.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Welcome To Your Perfect Home from Deepwater Games for this review.

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