Designed by: Leo Colovini
Masons is a simple and fairly abstract game that sees players building walls, towers and houses and scoring for them using a hand of cards.
The board is a plain landscape with a grid of triangles printed on it. Players start with six scoring cards each, dealt from the deck. On your turn you first place a wall – anywhere on the lines of the grid. You then roll three dice, which dictate the colour (there are three) of a tower that will go at one end of the wall (if there’s room for a tower at the other end, you choose the colour yourself) and the colours of two houses that go either side of the wall.
Play continues like this until any of the walls form an enclosed space – this is a city, and will prompt a scoring round. Firstly, the player who put the final wall in the city can – if they choose to – remove a section of wall(s) to connect the just-completed city to a previously completed one. Then starting with the active player, scoring begins:
You can play either zero, one or two cards to score with – they score various things such as the amount of houses and palaces of a certain colour in the city (two houses in a city immediately transform into a palace when the city is complete) or the colours of towers within it, or a point per tower of each colour – and other cards score elements that aren’t in the city, but are dotted about in the wilderness.
No matter whether you play one or two cards (if you play none, you’re obliged to discard a scoring card) you only take one new card from the deck – so playing more than one scoring card will diminish your hand and give you less scoring choices in the future.
It’s a game of simple rules and plays pretty fast.
It's hard to really target anybody, as you won't know what scoring cards they have. But it is possible to read someone's intentions by keeping a close eye on where they are placing things on the board.
It really depends on the players - something you could say for most games, but Masons can be played at a clip or more leisurely, with a bit of calculation and comparison...
There is some - early on you'll have more scoring options, and later in the game placement becomes more important.
It's easy to learn and usually finishes in under an hour. And it looks pretty!
2-4
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Masons doesn't really give you sense of being a builder - it's a fairly reactive and abstract game where your moves are dictated by the cards. It's not one I ever yearn to play, but it functions well as short and easy-to-teach game that will help kids get their heads around simple strategy.