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First, Deep Water Games has announced that it will bring Benoit Turpin's Welcome To... — a roll-and-write-ish design that Blue Cocker Games debuted at the FIJ fair in late Feburary 2018 — to the U.S., with the game debuting at the Origins Game Fair in June 2018 ahead of its official release at Gen Con 2018 in August. (Deep Water has already commissioned a small advanced print run of the game, and it will take preorders for pick-up at Origins on its website starting April 18.)
You can listen to Turpin explain the game himself in the video below, but the short version is that each player is an architect hired to design three streets, then sell them for the biggest profit, which we humans evaluate in terms of points. You create three decks of cards, then turn over the top card of each pile to reveal the number on top of the pile and the bonus action on the back of the previous card; each player chooses a number+action pair, then writes the number in a house on one of the streets (with the numbers needing to go in ascending order on each street) and uses the action to add trees to a street, add a pool to a house, build a fence, raise the value of certain house groupings, and so on.
If you complete one of the three planned arrangements of houses — say, one group of three houses and another of four, each with a number on it — then you score bonus points, with the player who completes it first scoring more.
Welcome To... has the roll-and-write feel of something like Qwixx since everyone is playing at the same time and trying to make the best of identical circumstances, but with three choices each turn and three streets in which to enact those choices, your paths diverge quickly and you find many more things to puzzle over than in more straightforward roll-and-write games.
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If you run out of cards to play in Get the MacGuffin, you're out of the game, and the MacGuffin is a card that lets you pick it up and play it over and over again, so you'll never lose — assuming, of course, that the MacGuffin is even in play or that you can hold on to it should you get it on the table.
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The sad part about this design is that you can finish only half the game, then must put it aside until May 2019 when the second half is released.
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