Designed by: Wei-Min Ling
When Walking in Burano players are building their very own street from cards – a row of five houses comprised of three cards each. Once built, you can populate the building with an inhabitant or a tourist to score you points.
Everyone begins with three coins and on your turn you can pick up three things: one must be a card from the central display, which has a row of ground, first and second-floor cards to choose from. The others can be more cards (from the same column) or coins, or one of each. Having picked up a card, you can now pay 1, 3 or 5 coins to add 1, 2 or 3 cards to your ‘street’ on the table in front of you. Obviously ground floor cards must be at the bottom and second-floor cards at the top… but also due to some rigid planning regs in Burano, no two adjacent houses can be the same colour!
As soon as a house is complete you can place a tourist or inhabitant at the bottom, which will score points for you at the end of the game – inhabitants will score for the house they are next to, but tourists will score for the whole street. How they score is the crux of the game: every tile contains two or more components – chimneys, cats, awnings, flowers, plant pots… and your tourists and inhabitants are on the lookout for a mix of these things in your street. So whilst collecting cards and composing your street is fairly simple, the puzzle here is watching what’s on each card and trying to match them up with the right tourist or inhabitant who likes what you’re building.
As soon as the cards run out, the final round plays out and then players score all their people – with a potential rug-pull in the player with the most boarded-up windows loses points!
Very little - it's worth noting though that the tourists and inhabitants are finite, so you can be beaten to the last one by a competitor.
Pretty much absent. Although there are decisions to be made here, they are really about building point-scoring opportunities at the same time as building houses.
The rules are very light, but the winner will have best spotted ways to combine the available building cards together.
The cards flip randomly and the game is reasonably light. Although on a first play the ways to score might seem numerous after 2 or 3 plays Burano will zip along nicely.
1-4
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
I've only played Walking in Burano once so far, but I'd be happy to go back an visit again. Accessible rules, a smidgen of tactics and just the pleasant sensation of seeing your 'street' coming together.