Create a Small City, a Tiny Train Line, and an Eensy Empire with Nano9games

I'm a sucker for concept creations, especially art that results from self-imposed restrictions. Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea is one such creation, with the story driven by the concept that residents on an island are forbidden from using certain letters as these letters fall off a plaque. Dunn himself writes chapters of the book under these same restrictions, dropping letters from his text and writing in increasingly roundabout ways until the situation is resolved in the book's final act.

Designer Alban Viard of AVStudioGames is apparently similarly inspired by such restrictions, taking the "9 Card Game Print and Play Design Contest" that has run regularly on BGG — here are the 2021 winners of the sixth such event — and expanding the concept to a game that uses precisely nine cards, nine cubes, and nine dice. He dubs these titles "Nano9games", and he's funding three such games on Kickstarter through the end of November 2021.

Railways, for example, is a solitaire version of Viard's 2016 game Tramways, with you attempting to build a railroad empire in the mid-19th century by developing railroads, expanding buildings, and moving passengers. To set up the map, you use the map side of four of the eight double-sided cards, using the alternate side of the remaining four cards to combine icons to perform actions: build a link, upgrade a link, add a passenger, move a passenger, build a building, take money, and decrease pollution. (If you play two icons from the same card, you must increase your pollution, which will affect your profit.)

Your goal is to make as much profit as possible, and you earn money when you move passengers through links and buildings. (Alternatively, you play with goals such as getting all passengers to their destinations or build and upgrade all complete links on the map.) With a second set of cards — and dice and cubes in a different color — you can play Railways with two players.

The second Nano9games title is City Planner from Viard and Todd Sanders, the latter of whom provides all graphic design work for the series.

Viard describes City Planner as a combination of his titles Town Center and Card City, both from 2012, with dice being brought into this mix. Each of the two players has a card they use to track their money and points, with the remaining seven cards each showing six buildings in a variety of colors. Each player starts with $5.

On each turn after the first, you receive one card from the opponent that has a die locked in place; you then roll a die on each of the other six cards, placing the die on the building with the appropriate number. You can pay $1 to adjust up to three dice up or down one space, after which you (1) lock a die on a building and slide it to the opponent, then (2) score $ and points based on which buildings are covered on the six cards still in front of you.

Ideally you can combo red and green buildings to maximize your points and blue and yellow buildings to keep dollars flowing in to allow for future manipulation. Purple and black buildings have their own functions. At game's end after eight rounds, $5 = 1 point, and whoever has the most points wins.

You can also play City Planner as a solo game with you trying to maximize your score.

The third Nano9games design is the solitaire game Empire from Todd Sanders, who has previously designed solitaire titles such as Mr. Cabbagehead's Garden, Pulp Invasion, and The Draugr.

For a design with few components, this one has a lot going on! You use three cards to track profit (which is what you want to maximize over fifteen turns), what items can be sold for at the market, and the amount of capital and each of the three resources you have at the central factory. The other six double-sided cards are buildings, and you set them up at random in a row, with at least one factory producing materials, commodities, and goods (the three resources).

On a turn, you first roll a die to set the sale prices for resources at the market, then you take 1-4 actions, always in this order: sell resources for profit, hire/move workers, build a building/trigger events, produce resources/capital. You can skip any of the actions, but the ones you do perform must take place in the order listed, and you pay for each action taken beyond the first.

As you build buildings, you must connect them using the one-way paths on their cards, and in addition to hiring workers, you can move workers down a path to the next building in line, which you'll want to do as a building must be fully staffed before it will produce resources/capital. Additionally, after removing a newly constructed building from the row, the event on the next building might take place depending on which turn you're on, with events being a mix of positive and negative.

You can check out the complete rules for Empire, which was first available as a print-and-play design in 2019 from Sanders' Air and Nothingness Press, on the BGG game page.

One side of the nine cards