Tag City
Designed by: Robin David
In Tag City you’re painting the town red – and a number of other colours, as you make your way across the town graffitiing your spray-can art on all and sundry. How this occurs is through the medium of dice and wipeable boards.
Each player begins with their own board broken up into a grid, which you’ll be filling up during the game: be the first to fill a column for three points. The first to fill a row gets five points. And the first to fill one of the coloured areas gets even bigger bonuses, meaning each decision you take matters.
So what are the decisions based on? Each turn someone will roll dice and assign them to some tetromino shapes from an available pool. On your turn, you take a die and fill in the matching shape on your board – the shape can be rotated or flipped, but it must be filled in in full. If you can’t or don’t want to take a shape, you can play a drone instead – these cost you points, but let you choose any shape on the board – including the small ones for hard-to-fill spaces. In fact, drones are the only way to access these!
If you don’t want to go at all, you can ‘check your status’ and basically pass a turn. Again, this does cost you minus points (although only one each time you pass) but any player taking this option means the available options diminish for everyone!
The game ends in a number of different ways – when all drones or status checks have been taken, or when all rewards (columns, rows, colours) have been claimed.
Sam says
Tag City could have been about anything – the graffiti theme kind of drifts away when you take the lid off the box. But here at GNG we like roll and write games when they’re simple fun, and Tag City is certainly that – combining the head-scratching spatial puzzle with the race to be the first to do X with the agony of someone taking the shape you really, really wanted. Probably best with four, this has been a big hit in our house even with two players.
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Take That!
No-one should be leaning over and rubbing out your board, but there can - and should - be wails of agony when someone grabs the blue bonus just before you do.
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Fidget Factor!
Pretty minimal.
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Brain Burn!
It's a race across multiple circuits at the same time - rows/columns/colours - where you win by getting your geometric ducks in a row!
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Again Again!
Dice are random and you can try different approaches too. It's not a game of deep and murky depths, but at 20 minutes playtime one wouldn't expect that.
