Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
- Board's Eye View
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
With their 'Flashback' series, Kokorin Games are seeking to build a niche of basing board games on iconic photographs. Lunch Atop a Skyscraper is themed around the famous photo of eleven construction workers nonchalantly eating their lunches while sitting on a steel beam suspended 850 feet above ground. The original photo was taken in 1932 during the construction of what is now part of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan,
Eloi Pujadas has designed a rondel tile-drafting game where players are selecting construction worker figures to assemble for their own Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photo. These will score at the end of the game for the run of adjacent characteristics: wearing a hat or hatless, wearing a vest or overalls, carrying a lunchbox or bottle, and wearing brown boots or black shoes. The wrinkle is that the construction workers are all standing when you draft them and it's only once you take them that you flip them to their seated side, and this will have one characteristic altered from the standing side; so, for example, a standing figure who is carrying a lunchbox may instead be holding a bottle on the seated side. Drafting is not a complete lottery, however, because most worker tiles show one characteristic that you can be sure will not change.
As in other rondel games - for example, First in Flight (Genius Games) - you can move as far as you like around the rondel but it's always the turn of the player who is furthest behind. That means if a player jumps two or three places ahead, the player in last place could take two or three extra turns. Given that you are adding a worker to your beam every turn and the game ends immediately when a player has eleven workers seated on their beam, players will mostly want to avoid leaving a large gap that lets their opponent collect multiple workers. To counter this, players that pass over at least two stacks of tiles get to take a token that can either be used straightaway to swap a characteristic of one of their already seated workers or can be retained to be worth a point in end-of-game scoring.
The scoring for each characteristic is determined by the position of a marker on the four tracks that represent each pair of characteristics. The starting position of the markers is determined using a randomly drawn 'trend' tile but some construction worker tiles let you move a marker in either direction along its track. If, for example, you have built a run of hatless construction workers, you'll want to push the marker towards the left of the track so that each of the hatless workers in your largest run scores 3 points and runs of workers with hats score just 1 point each. In our plays at Board's Eye View we've found it's the tug-of-war manipulation of the track that's been the difference between winning and losing.
Kokorin have incorporated two 'mini-expansions' that add in optional rules. 'Your Own Style' has each player take a token representing a characteristic and that becomes their own secret additional scoring objective. You'll score a point for every worker with that characteristic anywhere on your beam, regardless of adjacency. 'Agency Rules' sets a sequence of characteristics that becomes a points-scoring objective. If you play with this 'mini-expansion' it adds a racing element to the game because the number of points for matching the sequence reduces after a player claims it. Neither of these optional rules greatly overcomplicate the game so you could introduce them even on a first play.
Tho' Lunch Atop a Skyscraper is easy to play, it's a satisfying game that works at all player counts. And with a 20-30 minute playing time that means it's a game you can actually play in your lunch break - tho' we don't recommend doing so atop a steel beam 850 feet in the air!