Ape Town
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
Ape Town is a tile placement and area control game designed by Reiner Knizia and published by Outset Media. There's a very loose theme involving simian gangsters but, as with many other of Dr Knizia's designs, the mechanics are more important than the game's wafer-thin thematic veneer.
The 2-4 players draft a tile from the circuit around the board. You can always take the first available tile for free but you can skip ahead and take any of the revealed tiles provided you are prepared to place one of your bundles of cash out on every tile you pass over. It's a familiar drafting mechanic. The position from which you take the tile will have a black, white or grey background, and the tile you take has to be placed in a correspondingly coloured zone on the board; there are three zones of each colour, and each zone contains eight hexes. Some tiles immediately score: tarsiers score 1 point for each adjacent banana, chimpanzees score 2 points per adjacent banana, and mandrills score 3 points per adjacent banana. You score regardless of whether the tile you placed out was an ape next to one or more bananas or a banana next to one or more apes.
If you draft an orangutan or a lemur, these don't score immediately but they determine who scores for area control when a zone has all eight hexes filled. For this purpose you need to mark which player placed the tile and you do this by covering it with a transparent plastic token in the player's colour. The player with the most orangutans in a zone has area control but in the event of a tie it's the player with the most lemurs who has control, even if that player doesn't have any orangutans there. If lemurs also tie then nobody scores that zone. Adjacent zones also score but only if they contain fewer lemurs than the zone that triggered the scoring.
It's this triggering mechanic that is the most interesting aspect of the game as the same well-planned, well-placed lemur tiles can end up scoring you an area control bonus multiple times... The basic gameplay is simple and straightforward - essentially just taking a tile and placing it - but there are meaty decisions to be made over which tile to take, when and where best to place it. Casual players will probably focus most on maximising their immediate scoring while those who prefer a deeper game will be drawn to the challenge of setting themselves up to benefit from the tricksy and more complex area control scoring.
And no, Charlton Heston doesn't make an appearance.
