Once upon a time, this town we live in was a quiet sleepy village that never saw many people or much activity. But the affordable property has attracted a wide variety of people-new families, artists, startup companies and celebrities of all sorts. Even those pesky influencers have landed here. Today we will explore a game that has us in charge of city streets in this neighborhood and see who can make the most money for their little piece of the city!
Streets is designed and illustrated by Haakon Hoel Gaarder and published by Sinister Fish Games. It plays 1-5 players and plays in 30-60 mins.
Overview
In Streets, players invest in businesses and homes trying to create attractive streets to attract different types of people. As streets are completed people will move into new buildings and allow players to earn money. The player with the most profit will be the winner!
Gameplay
The city begins with the Central station and one of each player color on the middle tile laying down. Each player begins with their ownership tokens and a starting hand of three buildings.
The turn sequence in this game will start with the first player and then rotate clockwise around the players. The sequence is:
1. Build a building
2. Score Streets
3. Pick up a new Building
In Build a Building the current player chooses a building from their hand and places it next to another building in the city and for each symbol on the building there is a person placed on it from supply laying face down. No people are placed at wild symbol buildings.
There are different ways to place buildings but the basic idea is that they must be placed so their roads connect or so that they are perpendicular to the next building to form a new street. Streets cannot be any larger than 5 buildings, that is their maximum size.
In Score Streets players will score any enclosed streets. This will gain you money and now the people in your neighborhoods will attempt to move to other streets with open unenclosed neighborhoods that match their symbology.
Buildings score based on their valuation and give the player that owns the building that much money plus $1 for each person placed on the building. The people in the buildings will now move to any non-enclosed street on a matching building type, or stand up because they have FOMO and are waiting for a matching building type to join.
Finally in Pick up a new Building the current player takes the top building from the stack, adds it to their hand and then the game passes to the next player. Once this stack is empty and all the players’ hands are empty, end game scoring will begin. At the end, all buildings with ownership signs still will score at half the value. The player with the most money at the end of the game is declared the winner!
Impressions
Streets is a fun little game of city-building that we all enjoyed here on our table. We had a good time exploring the colorful tiles and components of this game. Players take the time to build up the streets together while trying to get the right placement at the right time-it is a game of skill that definitely required some proper tile placement to maximize the money you could take from that street.
I like the theme here also, the idea of building up a city where you are trying to move and build in the right spots to attract the right people from other areas. It is a game of proper tile placement along with timing to make sure it all flows well. It is a game that lends itself to more competitive play then I had originally expected getting into it, and the more we played the more you could see the need to be in the right spots at the right time.
I would recommend this for a player who loves a game that involves strategy but isn’t a super hard game to get right into. The rules are simple to understand and the game is one that most players would enjoy even if they are newer to the world of hobby games. It is presented in such a fun package, from the shape and style of the box to the art and the components you can tell that Sinister Fish Games went all out on their effort putting this one together!
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