Águeda: City of Umbrellas Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Águeda: City of Umbrellas, a pattern building game published by 25th Century Games. Águeda: City of Umbrellas is based on the art festival from Portugal.

I love the way tabletop games transport to different places. Many of them are worlds of fantasy full of shining kingdoms, magical creatures, big-stompy robots, or space wizards. Others are based in our world are celebrate something unique about a region. PARKS, as an example, celebrates the beauty of the National Parks in the United States.

Águeda is another example as we dive into the Portuguese city’s summertime festival as one to five players work as street artists to balance the needs of the shops on their street to build the most beautiful collection of umbrellas. The game was made in conjunction with the Umbrella Sky Project.

The goal of Águeda is to build the most desirable display of umbrellas as you paint your mural, unlocking additional tourists, which, ironically, are workers.

There are four steps to each player’s turn. The first is to select a diagonal of umbrellas from the Market Board. If you select a diagonal with only one umbrella, you take that umbrella and a coin. A diagonal with two umbrellas gets both while a diagonal with three umbrellas costs a coin.

The second step is to place the umbrella(s) on your player board, which can be done in any order without skipping spaces. If you cover a paintbrush spot matching the color of one of your facedown mural tiles, you can flip that tile (which is the third step). Any umbrellas that don’t fit onto a row are returned to the draw bag. Once you have both mural tiles within a row flipped art side up, you can add that tourist to your available worker supply by placing them on a suitcase space.

The fourth step is attracting tourists. You can tell because the meeples have cameras around their necks. Or maybe they’re paparazzi. Either way, you can place one tourist on a row of your display to gain one point per color of one of the umbrellas on that