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While I enjoy such games, I prefer designs that put players in the same gamespace, designs in which we collectively create something that serves as a record of play while also being meaningful in terms of who wins, designs such as Leo Colovini's Castello Methoni from Mandoo Games.
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After the first game
In this game, the board starts empty, and you have a hand of five cards. On a turn, you take one or two actions, and you have two choices for each action: (1) Discard a card to get two coins from the bank for an active market (but no markets are active to start with), or (2) Discard a card to place a wall on the empty border of a triangle that matches the color of the card discarded, after which you place one of your cubic houses on one side of the wall and a house of either of your neighbors (i.e., the players sitting to your left and right) on the other side.
If you enclose a space with walls, you create a domain — but you must be able to afford the domain to create it, paying 1 coin per triangle in it to the bank and 1 coin per house that is not yours to the owner of that house. If three houses of the same color are in a domain, you remove those houses and replace them with a villa of the same color. If you enclose a market in a domain, that market is now active, and you claim the coin from that market. You then mark this domain with a tower, and you have only four towers, so you can create only four domains...sort of.
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We made a balloon!
When a domain you create shares a wall with another domain, you can annex that domain that same turn by buying out its owner, paying them 2 coins per triangle in the domain, 1 coin per house, and 5 coins per villa. The color of the houses and villas don't matter because it's all owned by whoever has their tower in that domain. If your enlarged domain shares a wall with another, you can annex that domain as long as you can afford to do so, converting three houses of a color to a villa following each annexation.
The house-to-villa transformation matters because it boosts the cost of someone else buying you out. Sometimes, you want to be bought out because each coin is worth 1 point at game's end, whereas each triangle in a domain of yours is worth 3 points. The trapezoid on the right edge of the image below would cost 13 to annex (6 for the triangles + 2 for the houses + 5 for the villa), but it's worth only 9 points...maybe.
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At the start of a turn, for each market in a domain you own, you receive 2 coins from the bank — and coins are worth points, in addition to being a tool to take actions. Additionally, each player has a secret scoring card that shows three adjacent landscape types, and each triangle of those types in a domain of yours is worth 4 points instead of 3, so that domain might be worth 12 points to you, with a market payout next turn (assuming you still own it then) to make it worth 14 — or maybe even 16 or 18.
Finally, the largest domain on the board at game's end earns its owner 10 points, while the second-largest domain is worth 5 points. Ties are super friendly, with a tie for first place giving each tied player 10 points and with second place still being awarded.
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Final development of that board
I've played Castello Methoni five times on a copy I bought at SPIEL '19, three times with three players, twice with four, and I'm sorry it took me this long to get it to the table because the game — being a tactical, highly-interactive framework that's filled in by the players' collective actions — is squarely in my wheelhouse. Honestly, I got it to the table only thanks to BGG now selling Castello Methoni in the BGG Store, which created a work-related purpose to play it. No matter how much I anticipate playing a game, if I'm playing it "solely" for fun, it takes a back seat to other games that I'm covering in this space. That's demented, but apparently I can't help it.
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Castello Methoni is actually a stock game in disguise with the landscape serving as the stock. You found a company, i.e., create a domain, then either increase the size of that company (by creating an adjacent domain, then merging the two, which costs you nothing) or hope that someone else buys you out. When you're bought out, the money that you receive for that domain is always worth more than what you spent to acquire it, which means you've increased your net worth — but that money might be less valuable than the number of points that domain's owner will receive at game's end, which means the buyer is also increasing their net worth.
Ideally, you're working virtuously with the other players to sort of partner with them to increase your holdings collectively. I've played games in which I annex things back and forth with other players, but at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to buy someone out, so you do need a bit of in-game calculation to determine when you reach that threshold.
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My first four-player game
Still, Castello Methoni is far cleaner and smoother than Acquire in how domains merge. You have more control (sort of) over what's going to happen on the game board because you have five cards in hand and don't need to rely on having a specific letter-number tile to ensure that two companies are merged. In this game, a red card lets you play on any border in that territory and a yellow anywhere in that territory, and the combined market/seashore card allows you to play on any outer border space or the border of any market, whether active or not.
You can play at most two cards on a turn, so you play those based on what you might want to do with the other three on the subsequent turn. Ideally, you're setting things up so that you can close out a domain in the future or annex something or build on something someone has done before, but everything you do is contingent upon what other players do — and that's a hallmark of Colovini designs. You exist in a shared game space, and it's extremely difficult to do anything on your own, and whatever you do impacts the immediate choices of everyone else. Anywhere you put down a wall, any other player (if they have the right cards) can place two walls and create a one-triangle domain. Anyone with the right two cards can create a one-triangle domain adjacent to another domain, then (depending on their cash) annex it.
Our games have played out very differently. In one game, everyone tried to get markets first because you're getting ducats from the bank — but everyone was building very tiny domains, so little money was going into the bank, so a market was worth no more than any other space. The next game played out completely differently, with us largely ignoring markets for the first half of the game. You can count cards and hope to set up a large domain that no one else can close before your turn comes around again — although domains that start large are ripe takeover targets since they contain fewer houses per triangle. (Buying a triangle + a house costs 3 coins, but that triangle is worth "only" 3 points at game's end, so you're breaking even on the purchase unless the domain is one of the two largest or in your secret scoring areas.)
The look of Castello Methoni is old-school German design where everything is made for function. The landscapes look nice, but the board is crisply divided into land types along the line of older Colovini titles such as Clans and Alexandros. There's no transition between land types; the board is strictly divided so that you know exactly where everything is and what is connected to what.
I go into yet more detail about the game, such as how you can affect the pace of play, in this overview video. I was going to hold off on creating a video until I had played a couple of times with five players — a set-up that would give you only 12 starting money compared to 15 with four players and 20 with three — but I also thought that I had waited long enough on this game already and wanted to share my joy with it before too much more time had passed...
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