Old London Bridge

In Old London Bridge each player is building their own version of the famous bridge from 800 years ago. The bridge itself, commissioned by King Henry II, was to last several hundred years (allowing for renovations) but yours will go back in the box after about an hour.

Each player has their own bridge foundation, a cleverly-devised 3D construct made of cardboard. During the game’s twelve rounds, you’ll add a new building to your bridge, and at the end of the game everyone’s bridge will score in a few different ways – one of which is having the most buildings. Some of your earlier buildings may be demolished, as we shall see.

At its heart Old London Bridge is a game of numbers. Each of the 60 or so buildings has a distinct number, and when you add a new building to your bridge – from left to right – these numbers must be descending. So if my first building is, say, the 29, the next cannot be 30 or higher: it must be 28 or lower. As you run out of numeric options, you can can ‘reset’ your numbers by adding a park: after that, the first building number can be anything (and after that, numbers must descend again).

The buildings are all in stacks on the board, around a rondel. Each round, all players place a secret bid to decide turn order: when these are revealed the highest bidder will get first choice, and the player choosing last may have their options severely restricted – especially in a four player game, as there are only six different stacks, one of them is made up of the aforementioned parks, and one slot – the X slot – is always unavailable.

When you add a building to your bridge, many of them will instantly activate a special power: the Chapel pushes you up the chapel track, which determines turn order when bidding is tied (which happens a lot!). The Bridge Gates also have a track, and moving up it you’re rewarded at certain points with little one-off abilities that break the standard rules: boosting a bid for example, or keeping a bidding card instead of discarding it as per normal. The Hostelry gains you more bidding cards and the Haberdasher (somewhat idiosyncratically) gets you money. The Guild Houses don’t have an action, but they boost other actions: the power of the action on the building you take is defined by the flag on it: when you have matching flags in other buildings on your bridge, they supercharge this action. For example, you build a new Haberdasher, and it has an orange flag which gives you a coin. But you have three other orange flags on your bridge already, so you get not one coin, but four.

There’s a little more going on around this basic bid/build rhythm. All the slots on the rondel give you money (except the off-limit X slot) but one player can utilise the centre of the rondel and pay coins instead, to use an occupied slot. If you’re ever at a point where you can’t legally place a building (and can’t or don’t want to place a park) you can simply kick a building off your bridge and replace it with a new one! This must still follow the descending-numbers rule, but otherwise works the same as usual. After the twelfth round there is some final scoring: for the Chapel and Bridge Gate tracks, for the most-buildings on bridges, and for the collective value of whatever bidding cards you have left. Everything scores you coins, and the richest player is the winner.