Board Game Review - Machi Koro
Machi Koro is a fantastic family option for game night. It combines dice rolling with card-based strategy. During the game, you roll the die and the result combined with your owned cards determines the outcome. Each player begins with a wheat field, die value one, and a bakery, die value two-three. The wheat field is blue, this means that you can collect one coin on anyone's turn if a one is rolled. On the other hand, the green bakery allows you to collect one coin on a two or three result but only on your own turn.
The objective of the game is to be the first to purchase all four of your landmarks. Each of these provides a significant ability to the player. For example, the cheapest at only four coins is the train station, it provides the ability to roll one or two dice. The most expensive is the radio tower at twenty-two coins, this one provides the ability to re-roll the dice once per turn. Note: when rolling two die you can choose whether to re-roll one or two of your die.
In order to improve your odds of winning you buy cards after the roll, and its results, have been resolved. Each of the face up cards has a coin cost as well as its roll activation number and the effect it has when triggered. There are fifteen different cards in four colours, blue, green, red and purple. Blue cards trigger on anyone's turn, green and purple are on your own turn and red are on opponent's turns. When choosing cards, it is important to choose ones which compliment those you already have. Whether this means expanding the numbers your cards activate on or building up the number of a certain type of card or purchasing buildings which give you coins based on the number of cattle ranches or wheat fields etc. which you own.
The ease with which you can build your town using your chosen strategy is as much determined by the deck layout the group is playing with as it is by the luck of the roll. The creators of Machi Koro include two deck types in their instruction book. First, is their standard set up, for this set up there is no deck to speak of. Instead, there are individual piles for each of the fifteen cards. This method is great for playing with younger children and those people not used to playing strategic board games. This deck type makes the game as accessible as it can be by presenting all of the cards clearly. This provides all players the opportunity to plan ahead and think about their next turn. They have access to everything they may need to reference in front of them.
If the standard deck layout makes things too simple the game's creators have you covered. The second deck layout they include is the variant layout. For this one, you shuffle together all fifteen of the card types and deal them out until you have eight distinct cards shown face up. You can have all of one type of card out before having eight stacks and you must keep dealing. This deck type greatly increases the strategic thinking element of the gameplay by removing many of the options from the board. In the early game, the decks are likely to be balanced with almost equal opportunity for purchasing one or two die cards. However, as it progresses the one die cards will be purchased and players become forced to choose whether to buy into higher roll value cards or to keep their coin and hedge their bets on cards becoming available to them next turn which reflect their plans. This play deck adds more complexity to the game which is more than welcome amongst me and my friends.
A third deck style I have come across is the three decks layout. This layout comes as an option for intermediate play. As the name suggests, for this layout you create three separate decks: the first with roll valves one to five, second, values six only, third, values seven through twelve. For piles one and three, you turn over cards until you have four options face up, and for pile two you face up two options. This layout removes the increasing need to plan and strategist spending which the variant layout arises. It does this by preventing the face up cards from skewing towards the higher roll value cards. It adds a little more complexity by only showing two-thirds of the possible businesses at one time.
When testing out the various deck layouts with different player numbers the strengths and weaknesses of certain ones became more obvious. For two player games I found that the variant layout produced the best results. As the number of players increases to three then four the other layouts become much more balanced and viable. At four players, the layouts create a range for the complexity of the game which helps to adapt the game for any player base.
When playing as only two players it is much easier to get the cards you want in bulk. If you are both going for different strategies, then more often than not the players will stick to low cost cards from the one die value range. The easy availability of these cards in the standard and three stack layouts makes it all the more certain that the higher die value cards will be redundant. Without competition for certain cards, this increases the more players there are, there is more to drive you to take higher cost, higher die valve cards. The variant layout, as mentioned previously, tends to skew towards displaying the higher die value cards and restricts access to lower die value cards. For two player games, this layout artificially creates the necessary 'competition' required to make the purchase of two die cards a more viable option for progression.
Even though the necessity for artificial competition decreases as player numbers increases, the variant layout is no less viable as an option with more people. Machi Koro is a game optimised for three or four players and as a family game with an age rating of ten plus, it needs to be adaptable to remain playable for older or more experienced gamers. The three layouts present a well-balanced, thoroughly enjoyable gameplay experience across three separate difficulties. Overall, this is a great game which is highly adaptable with great replay value.
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