Tangram City Review

boardgamequest.com:

Uwe Rosenberg has mastered the polyomino in board games, but how’s he doing with tangrams?  (Traditionally, a tangram is a Chinese geometric puzzle consisting of a square cut into seven pieces that can be arranged to make various other shapes.)

Tangram City is a tile placement game from Capstone Games designed by Uwe Rosenberg for 1-5 players that plays in about 20-40 minutes. Will you build the best city and be rewarded with all the riches of the kingdom?

In Tangram City, players earn points by filling their City Board with tangram-shaped City Tiles. Everyone begins with an identical set of 23 two-sided City Tiles, red on one side, green on the other. Over 6 rounds, players will place their tiles based on cards that are dealt at the beginning of each round. Four cards are distributed among the players, which can lead to shared cards and some cards being placed face-up or face-down on the table, depending on player count. Cards in the middle of the table are played first, then each player reveals their card in turn order. For every card, all players take the corresponding tangram tile shape from their personal supply and place it into their City.

Once all of the cards have been used for a round, scoring takes place. Players score a point for each space covered by their largest rectangle of placed tiles. Then everyone moves their red and green balance markers based on the number of green and red tile spaces showing in their City.

At the end of the game, red and green balance is checked and bonus points are awarded to players who’ve managed to be most in balance (whoever got closest to placing as many tiles of one color as the other). The player with the most points wins.

Tangram City is a very simple game mechanically. Each turn, you’ll have only one choice of tile to place and you put it on your board. Scoring is also straightforward as you just have to focus on expanding a large rectangle within your City. There’s not much depth beyond that, aside from trying to