Welcome To…

If you’ve been here before, you’ll know I’ve been writing articles about quick-and-easy games with excellent intimidating-to-fun ratios (that is to say, not intimidating at all and incredibly fun). We spoke about the cooperative psychic fiasco of The Mind, running with the bulls in 6 Nimmt!, lying to our loved ones in Cockroach Poker, and exiling villagers to avoid werewolves in the Silver Series. To send you off, I wanted to cover a roll-and-write style of game that can really exercise the minds of those of you who enjoy chasing scores and solving puzzles.

Welcome To... is a game for a bewildering one-to-one-hundred players. We take on the roles of architects, each designing towns in 1950s USA, and the game couldn’t be easier. Just give everyone one of the town sheets in the box, split the cards up into three even piles, find some pencils, and you’re already set up to play. In a game of Welcome To, we flip a card from each of the three piles, which gives us options on what we’d like to do on our turn. Each pile has a house number and a corresponding action – each player chooses the one they’d like to go for, and pencils it onto their sheet. We all take our turns simultaneously, so once everyone’s pencilled in what they want to do, we flip the next three cards and go again. Clever decisions in Welcome To are paramount. The longer the game goes the fewer options we have, so we want to balance maximising the points our town is worth with actually making sure all of it gets built. This game is a quiet puzzle where we have to make the most out of the pieces we’re given, and it’s a puzzle that I enjoy coming back to every time.