Tolleno
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Tolleno is a tile placement, building and area control game designed by Giles Turbide and published by Sit Down! There are rules for a very basic family game where you're just placing out canal tiles and adjacent buildings but the full game is more complicated, involving more end-game scoring, contract tiles that score for your own or for an opponent's adjacencies and, partway through the game, introducing canal boats that let you relocate building tiles that you've previously placed.
Essentially players are scoring for the building tiles they place out, ultimately earning extra points for area control of canal tiles and for stacking building tiles to create the highest buildings in the shared city tableau. When you take a contract tile you place it out on a location that would otherwise house a building, so you can use a contract tile not just for its scoring but also to block another player from placing a building to challenge your area control. Players have asymmetric scoring bonuses, so you'll want to be mindful of them over your decisions on where to place buildings, but the asymmetric scoring bonuses don't actually get triggered until most of your building tiles are out.
Even the 'full game' rules aren't overly difficult but the building placement rules can seem somewhat counterintuitive and the iconography on the contract tiles isn't as clear as it could be: new players will probably need to refer to the rulebook to decode some of the actions. Once you get over the hurdle of the unintuitive building placement rules and fully grok the options, Tolleno plays smoothly.
There's a plethora of scoring tokens that left us wondering whether it might have been better to have used a scoring track but that's a minor quibble over a game that you appreciate all the more the more you play it.
