Game Preview: Machi Koro, or Catan Writ Small

Despite the worldwide success of The Settlers of Catan in terms of it introducing people to modern game design, one common complaint is that the die rolls don't happen frequently enough to "even out" the results. While you expect more 7s than 6s and 8s, and more of those than 5s and 9s, etc. and you build settlements and cities with those expectations in mind, sometimes you'll have a game in which a single 8 is rolled or a half-dozen 2s and you'll find yourself stewing in frustration while some lucky duck runs away with the game.

Masao Suganuma's Machi Koro from Japanese publisher Grounding is a city-building game that exhibits this same feature — or bug, depending on your point of view — but the game plays out in 15 minutes, giving you plenty of time to play again to see whether you can even the odds.

Each player starts the game with only two cards — a wheat field (which is blue) and a bakery (green) — along with four face-down landmark cards. Your goal is to be the first player to build all of your landmarks; to do that you need money, and of course to make money, you must spend money — on new building cards. Fifteen types of building cards can be purchased. Each has a cost in the lower-left and a number at top; when that number is rolled on a player's turn, the building might pay out:

-----• Blue buildings pay out from the bank no matter who rolled the number.
-----• Red buildings pay out only on another player's turn, with that player paying you directly.
-----• Green buildings pay out only on your turn, with the bank giving you the money.
-----• Purple buildings pay out only on your turn, with you receiving money from opponents or swapping owned buildings; you can own only one of each type of purple building.

Each turn, you roll the die, then you can purchase one building or construct one of your landmarks, each of which provides a special ability, as can be seen in the image below:

My buildings after the first few turns of a game

Thus, each turn might take only seconds: roll, get money (or don't), buy. The question of what to buy, however, isn't always clear. Pick up another wheat field (1) that costs only one or invest in a forest (blue, 5) that costs three, but will possibly pay out even once people start rolling two dice? Buy out the bakeries, then build your landmark shopping mall to double your income from baked goods? Hoard all the ranches (blue, 2) with an eye toward a cheese factory (green, 7) that gives you three coins per ranch you own? You have many building choices, and anyone familiar with Catan will recognize the possible paths for development: diversify in the hope that you'll receive a trickle of coins each turn, concentrate on one cluster of linked buildings and swing wildly between poverty and jackpot, and save your small payments to focus on the landmarks, which let you adjust die rolls or take additional turns.

If you are tempted to pile up the coins to build the amusement park (which costs 16) or the radio tower (cost 22), that's where the purple buildings come in. Each of them takes effect when you roll a 6, and with them you can steal two coins from each opponent, steal five coins from one opponent, or swap one of your buildings for a building owned by an opponent. Without them, players are largely doing their own thing, but once someone acquires a TV station (steal five coins), you're on edge with each other die roll, waiting to see whether you'll lose everything and have to go back to scratching in the wheat fields once again.

I've played Machi Koro four times, thrice with the same single player and once as a three-player game. In the first two-player game, my opponent bought out the ranches, then went cheese crazy while I blanked on rolling 4s turn after turn after turn, making my convenience stores (green, paying out three coins) a wasted investment. In the second game, I bought a few ranches of my own to keep him from monopolizing them, then bought a business center (purple, costing eight) to swap my crummy wheat fields for his cheese factories. In the third game, he was now prepared for my theft, and we both diversified our holdings more to keep our options and respond to what the other player was doing, this time with me buying cafés in order to try to push him to build his station so that he'd then be rolling two dice and mostly whiffing on rolls due to him having buildings that generally pay out on low numbers. As with many of the quick-playing games from Japan that I've played in recent weeks, one game of Machi Koro rolled into the next, with us building off past plays immediately to explore the game anew.

(Thanks to Japon Brand, which will have copies of Machi Koro available at Spiel 2013, for providing a review copy of this game.)

All of the building cards and other components