Roll and adjust property values

 I picked up Town Constructor Junior (TCJ for the rest of this blog) in order to dabble with the Town Constructor family. It’s the entry level, family/kid friendly version of the game.

It’s a Print-and-Play Roll-and-Write. Hunting those down as become a hobby in and of itself in addition to my overall gaming hobby. It’s one of the ones where you are drawing a map on a grid. And those games are practically their own genre.

So, well trod ground.

Now, to TCJ’s credit, it does some things differently. What I’m used to seeing is having a die pick the map feature and another die for the location. Which can be good. It works for 30 Rails, which I consider an important R&W.

Instead, you use one die to pick out two of the four types of buildings from a table. The other die, you use the same table to adjust the values of those buildings. There are four wheel-shapes tracks with the spaces valued one to three. And they don’t just go up.

Every round after the third (so there’s time to get something on the map), you will pick a row or column to score, using the adjusted values. The game only lasts twelve rounds so you won’t use every space or row/column.

There are also some special buildings that give bonus scoring  and you get points for the largest group of each type of building. Pretty standard stuff but things become fundamentals because they work.

There are definitely some shortcomings. Not only are there only four types of buildings, there’s  nothing thematic about them really. They all do the exact same thing. TCJ is ultimately very abstract and drawing a map has a lot of room for theme.

However, those value wheels, those are good. Not only do I not remember seeing that mechanic before, they add some real value to the gameplay. They make every round more interesting and give some oomph to your decisions.

TCJ isn’t a perfect game. There are similar games out there I like more and a lot of that is because they have richer themes and mechanics that build on those themes. However, TCJ doesn’t blend in with the sea of R&Ws.