Shinjuku

In Shinjuku, players collaborate on building a network of subways across the Japanese city – but fight over the passengers!

The board shows the city broken into wards – different regions – and the planned train network. While players do build track in the game, the other thing you focus on building is the shops where passengers – in the game referred to as customers – want to go.

Each player’s turn begins by adding more customers to the board and an extra card to their hand of cards, with each card matching a single ward on the board. Then you can take two actions per turn (including two of the same action). One action is to open, which is discarding a card and placing a shop of your colour in a matching ward. You can discard a card to upgrade an existing shop into a department store, expand allows you to place track – anywhere – with the first expansion free and any extras costing you cards. And income allows you to draw cards. But you win the game by having the most sets of customers, and you can collect them by taking a move action.

There are four types of customer and each of them desire a specific shop – clothing, electronic, books and food. When you move customers, you pick up all the customers in a single ward and move them along the subway. Whenever you pass a shop, you must drop off a matching customer there if you have one. This is where having a department store helps, because building one not only gets you some bonus customers but it’s also a catch-all destination: any customer can go there. If your move action uses other players subways, they get a small dividend of a card from the deck into their hand.

Whomever owns the shops collects the customers, and at the end of the game you’ll score points for each set of four different customers you have (ten points) with sets of three, two and singles each worth significantly less, and the player with the most points will win. So throughout the game you’re sharing routes and shops and customers, but trying to pull off moves that mostly if not entirely only take customers to your own shops.

There are two expansions in the box: the CEO is worth adding on your first game as it’s a way to give you a lot more tactical flexibility, as it can generate wildcards for you to use that always match the ward you want to build in. The other is the Godzilla-like Kaiju, that rises up out of the sea halfway through the game and rampages around the city causing carnage: it moves customers from one ward to another, and its current location is always impassable.