Base price: $23.
1 – 5 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3

It feels like it’s been a while since I covered an Oink game, which is patently false: I covered DroPolter and Rafter Five recently. Maybe it’s a perception of time thing. Who knows? Lately, the days have dragged a bit. I’ve been a bit behind on reviews, whoops, but we’re making progress. The latter part of the month will be mostly crowdfunded games and preorder campaigns, so, look forward to that all happening then. Lots to talk about! At least five games, as far as I can remember. We’ll get to them later. For now, let’s check out Town 77!

In Town 77, the residents of a local town have gotten even snootier than their neighbors! They cannot abide the idea of being anywhere near a house that looks anything like theirs, and you are unfortunately obliged to help organize their neighborhoods as best as you can into one big square where everyone’s happy. Is that even possible? Who can say? But you’ll probably do your best.

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Setup is pretty trivial. All the tiles get shuffled inside of a bag:

Each player gets four, placing them in the little tile holders. You should be good to start! Draw a tile randomly and place it on the table to form the top-left corner of the grid.

Gameplay

Town 77 is all about building up the perfect city! As everyone knows, a perfect city can have no houses of the same color or shape in a given row or column, so your job is to make that happen!

On your turn, you’ll start by checking to see if you can exchange tiles. If you have three of the same color or three of the same shape, you can choose to exchange tiles by showing them, putting them back in the bag, shuffling the bag up, and drawing three more. Note that if you have four of the same color or four of the same shape, you can choose any three to exchange. Again, totally optional.

Then, you must place one of your tiles! You cannot place it above or to the left of the top-left tile, and you cannot place your tile in a row or a column where it matches any color or shape in that row or column. Check each other! If someone plays incorrectly, they have to place it somewhere else or use a different tile. Note that if nobody notices and you realize it later, flip the tile face-down and it’ll just be a null tile (no color or shape).

After doing that, draw a tile from the bag. You can then choose to discard a tile back to the bag, but if you do so, you don’t draw a replacement; your hand size is permanently reduced.

If you cannot play any of your tiles or if you’ve placed all of your tiles, you’re done playing. The player with the fewest tiles once every player has finished wins! Ties are broken in favor of whoever played a tile most recently, so your goal should be to be the last person still playing and play your last tile.

Player Count Differences

Overall, the major player difference is just how many tiles are available to players in totality. At lower player counts, there are just fewer tiles available, so there’s a decent amount of variance at play. Some games might take forever and you might play most of the tiles; others might be over in a few rounds because one player just gets absolutely trapped without any real way out. With more players, there are more tiles in play and so that probability is lessened somewhat. You’ll see more of the board change and grow between your turns, so in theory you’ll have more opportunities to place your tiles before the available board space contracts and everything becomes a mess. The dream. That’s … about it, though. The game isn’t so large or complex that there will be major swings due to player count, and the only other thing worth confirming is that there is a solo mode, for those of y’all who are interested in that sort of thing. As a result, not a major preference on player count from me, either.

Strategy

• Try to always have a couple backup plans. Don’t rely on your first instinct to get you through the entire game. Other players have their own tiles and their own plans which will, inevitably, come into conflict with yours. You really need to try to make sure you have a couple tiles you can play every turn, and try to set yourself up for success on that front.
• Note that there will eventually become spots where nothing can be played. Make note of them. These spots are essentially exclusion zones created when the row and column requirements don’t allow any tile to be played there (because every possible tile conflicts). Avoiding making those helps the game run longer, but you might be able to create some as traps for your opponents. That said, that’s dangerous play.
• I find that building diagonally can be helpful because it increases the opportunities for you to play in unrestricted areas. It usually expands the options of where you can play, and each time you build down or to the right you generally place the first tile of a new row or column, so you have a lot of options. That said, once you hit the 7×7 limit, things become more complicated, but that’s a good way to get out of being stuck with tiles you can’t use early in the game.
• It’s not always best to exchange tiles; sometimes you have a lot of open spaces for similar tiles, so you can actually make a good amount of progress. You can sometimes create spots where the only tile that can be played there is a tile you already have. When that happens, you can hold on to it for a bit as insurance, so you shouldn’t exchange it even if you could. That said, exchanging is usually a pretty good option.
• I wish I had some useful heuristic for you as to when you should start shrinking your hand size, but, I do not. It’s a bit of reading the table and a bit of luck. I usually drop one tile pretty early, but I’ve also had some bad luck in Town 77, so your mileage may vary on this particular advice.
• When you do discard, try to get rid of unplayable tiles first if you have any; they’re just dead weight in your hand. There’s no benefit to keeping them and, if you’re lucky, exchanging or discarding them might cause them to end up in your opponents’ hands. That’s great for you!
• You should try to note how many of each color other players have, as that might inform what you choose to play where. That can sometimes be useful information as it might tell you where they’re thinking about playing next and whether or not you should try to mess with their plans.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I really love the whimsical art style and colors of the game. The houses are all pretty silly shapes, and I encourage you to name them.
• Portability alone always puts Oink Games high on my list. I usually throw a bunch of Button Shy and Oink games in my suitcase whenever I’m going anywhere because I can fit 30 games in an extremely small footprint. Granted, I haven’t played a lot of games on my trips lately, but it’s the thought that counts.
• Plus, it’s pretty easy to set up and teach and get played. You really just shuffle it up and then get going; “don’t place a tile that matches anything in its row or column on shape or color” is pretty intuitive for most people, and even if it’s not, well, you can’t take illegal moves.
• The spatial challenge of this is pretty entertaining. I enjoy getting trapped and clowned and then saved by the random placement of one of my opponents. The game does a good job balancing silly, serious, and speed.
• Plays pretty quickly, too. Like I said, fast game. I think my record is losing after three or four turns, which was pretty embarrassing. Just hideously bad luck.
• I appreciate that there’s no penalty for an incorrect play; you can kind of just “nope” the other player and they have to find a different tile. It makes the rebuke feel a lot more mild since there’s no penalty and players can just figure out what they did wrong and fix it. Helps the game feel more tolerant and accepting of new or inexperienced players.
• Similarly, when someone’s out, it’s almost collaborative to make sure that they can’t play anywhere, which can be fun. It’s the final puzzle to be solved: are there any legal moves left for this player? Sometimes the answer is yes, but more often than not, there aren’t any moves left.

Mehs

• It’s somewhat frustrating that the tiles don’t fit in the tile holder at the start of the game. It’s a consequence of the tile holder needing to fit in the box, but … yeah, it’s frustrating that the four tiles hang over the edges a bit. It feels silly.
• It’s almost comical how fast you can lose if you get unlucky at lower player counts. Honestly, I find it funny, but I can’t exactly call it a “Pro”, so it ends up here in the middle.

Cons

• While I can appreciate what the extra shape and color do for the gameplay, you might be hard-pressed to explain to someone what the practical difference is between this and Town 66. Town 77 feels like a reboxed expansion for Town 66, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s kind of a Director’s Cut or a GOTY Edition or something, it seems. This just means that if you’re looking at both, the only difference that jumps out is that 66 is 6×6 and 77 is 7×7, which may not be enough of a justification for someone to own both. That’s a you call, though.

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Overall, I like Town 77! I kind of think of it as one of Oink’s first real expansions (though, notably, there is an expansion to Deep Sea Adventure), since it’s just Town 66 with one extra color and one extra shape in each color. Does that difference completely change the game? Not entirely, for me, since it still retains the echoes of Town 66, but that’s also why I still like this version as well. I think it’s slightly more flexible, since there are more colors and shapes, but that also means you’re a bit less likely to get three of the same thing and be able to exchange tiles, so you might find yourself stuck with a non-optimal hand with a higher frequency. Not great either! I think some folks are going to find themselves perfectly happy with Town 66, and that’s totally fine! This does add a bit more, but whether or not a standalone “upgraded” version is worth $23 is a decision that you really make for yourself. I’m always buying Oink Games because I’m a fan, and this was an easy one for me, especially since I liked Town 66 so much. I think I would have liked to see a bit more of a distance between the two, but oh well. I’ve had fun playing, I’ve had fun losing, and I’ve also managed to lose pretty much immediately, which has been spectacular. Truly, the dream. If you’re looking for a return to some highly particular towns, you enjoy a spatial challenge, or you just want to sudoku your way through a tile-laying game, you’ll probably enjoy Town 77! I certainly did.

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