Tangram City

In Tangram City, up to five players compete to build the largest city blocks, while keeping a balance between buildings and green space.

How to Play

Every player gets a player board and score marker in their color, plus an identical set of polyomino building tiles, six fountain tiles, and “balance markers” in green and black.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Every round, four cards will be revealed, one at a time.

Playing Out Cards

Here’s the first twist in the game: the first of the four cards will be face-up on the table for everyone to see. But the other three cards will be distributed face-down, so each player sees exactly one of them before they are played.

For example, in a three player game, each player gets a card face-down to look at. But in a five player game, the first player gets a card, then the next two players share a card to peek at, then the last two players share the final card.

After each card is revealed, all players find the matching City tile in their set and plays it somewhere in their city.

You may place a tile anywhere, as long as it does not overlap other tiles, or the edge of the map. But you’ll probably want to place it adjacent to other city tiles for a better score at the end of the round.

End of Round

After all four cards have been played out, every player also places a small triangle Fountain tile anywhere on their map.

Set the played cards aside and score each player’s city.

Each player looks for the largest fully built rectangle in their city; then they earn as many points as there are squares in that rectangle. For this part of scoring, color doesn’t matter.

After scoring, each player also adjusts their balance markers. Every full green square is a point for “nature” on the balance track, and every full brown square is a point for “buildings”. Squares that are half green and half brown are already in balance and don’t move either marker. Fountains complete a square, but don’t count for anything on their own; so if you combine a fountain with green space, that square is nature; if you combine it with brown space, it’s buildings. If you put two fountains together, they don’t count towards either.

Now pull four more cards for the next round, and give the first player marker to the player with the highest score.

Sixth and Final Round

After five regular rounds, there is a final round with the last three cards – reveal them simultaneously. Everyone can build these last buildings (if possible) in any order they wish, then place their final fountain.

Score the round normally, perform your balance check, and then move to the end game scoring.

Every player checks the distance between their two balance markers. If they are less than five spaces apart, they’ll score bonus points for having a well balanced city. A perfectly balanced city scores a whopping 20 bonus points!

There’s also a bonus for fully building the entire (7×7) grid of the City board with no gaps.

The player(s) with the highest score has built the most successful tangram city… this time.

Impressions

Uwe Rosenberg, the mastermind of polyomino games such as Patchwork and Cottage Garden, designed Tangram City. Is it worth visiting with your family?

My feelings on this one are mixed. There are some interesting decisions involved in filling in your city – obviously balance is important, but it’s a bonus that’s only applied at the end of the game. It’s more important to make a large rectangle as quickly as possible, because that is scored every round. You’ll fall behind if you don’t focus enough on filling in your gaps.

The game supplies more polyomino tiles than you actually need to fill the board – which is good, because you’ll be faced with some hard choices of where to place oddly shaped pieces as your board fills up. You are allowed to discard a piece without playing it, but you’ll never get it back. So be very sure you don’t want to use it!

Family Friendly

There are a few elements that make Tangram City a good fit for families.

First – since everyone places the same randomly-selected tile at the same time, it’s basically a multiplayer solitaire game, much like Karuba or Junk Drawer. This is great in a family game because no one can disrupt anyone else’s plans; everyone can build their own city the way they want to do it. This also makes it possible to play with a younger player who might not grasp all of the rules. They can feel as though they’re a part of the action, but their “interpretation” of the game won’t really affect others.

It also means that there are no significant rule changes to play Tangram City solo. You simply get to see the first two cards every round, then reveal the other two cards, one at a time, as you put down tiles.

I love how everyone gets a peek at an upcoming tile, but the player with the highest score gets the least useful peek. This is a surprising way to give lagging players a boost of helpful information!

But even then, no one has all the information. So you’ll need to keep your plans at least a little flexible if you want to fill in your spaces.

The downside is that the order of the cards are the only variation from game to game. You’ll see every tile, every time you play. It’s great for kids and light play, but for me, it started to feel stale after a few times.

Not for Overplanners

Although there’s little reason to pay attention to opponents’ boards, you’d better keep a close eye on your own. Since you know you’ll see every tile during the course of the game, it’s technically possible to plan out your whole city in advance. Maybe you can even do it perfectly, to get the valuable 7×7 bonus!

Of course, if you do this, you will annoy your fellow players by taking too long. And even then, you still might lose! If you fail to fill in a rectangle quickly, you’ll fall behind on points after every round.

Conclusion

Tangram City uses a tile-placement mechanic we’ve seen before, but with unusual shapes and scoring that keeps players invested all through the game. Players get different information about the tiles that will come out in a round, which helps struggling players to plan better and disadvantages strong players (a little bit).

The balance adds an extra twist, but is it enough to keep seasoned gamers engaged? We don’t think so, at least, not after playing a few times. Every game starts to feel the same, because it’s always a random card draw from the same set of tiles, with the same goals every time.

But not every family is filled with seasoned gamers. I’d recommend Tangram City for play with kids between 8-12, or with families who are interested in tile-laying or city-building games that don’t make you work hard to understand the rules.

Find it on Amazon, direct from Capstone Games, or at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Tangram City from Capstone Games for this review.

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