BENGALURU : Roll-and-writes are some of the most popular games around right now. They usually go like this — one player rolls some dice, and everybody marks down one of the resulting values onto a personal scoresheet of some sort. They’re quick, satisfying and can be quite puzzly, but what if you don’t like the randomness of dice? Replace them with a deck of cards, and you’ve got something like Welcome To.Despite an awkward name, Welcome To makes a great first impression. The cheerful ‘Welcome To Your Perfect Home’ on the front and the cheerful colours contribute to the overall upbeat tone of this game. You and...really, as many other players as you’d like take on the roles of real estate planners, trying to plot out the perfect suburban neighbourhood for people to live in. The theme is light, but it does come through in some interesting ways.
Setup couldn’t be simpler — divide the big deck of planning cards into three even stacks, hand everyone a sheet of paper depicting their personal project neighbourhood, flip the top card of each stack face up and you’re ready to go. Each round, players must choose one of the three numbers (on the face-up cards) and write that number down in one of the houses on their personal sheet. If they want, they can also choose to perform the bonus action visible on the top face-down card next to the face-up card they chose. Rinse, repeat, and so on until the game ends.
Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a game if there weren’t some wrinkles, right? The first is that house numbers must be written in ascending order from left to right — you can skip numbers, but the order must always be correct. The game mitigates this somewhat by giving you three streets in your neighbourhood (the ascending order rule only applies to houses on the same street), but picking a number soon becomes much trickier than you’d think.
Then you’ve got the bonus actions to think of as well, ranging from the ability to subdivide streets into smaller housing estates, increasing the value of certain kinds of housing estates, building pools and parks, and breaking the ascending order rule (but it’ll cost you points!). There’s much more going on here than you might think to look at it, and you’ll encounter difficult decisions very often — do you pick the perfect number and skip its bonus action, or maybe a less-than-optimal number just to get the bonus action associated with it?
If it’s not already obvious, I think Welcome To is an excellent game. It packs a lot of meaty and interesting choices into a ridiculously small box, and you can play it with just about anyone — even people who’ve never played a modern board game before. It’s fun, it’s fast and, once you’ve tried out the basic rules a few times, you can amp it up with public objectives that everyone’s racing to complete! There’s a lot going on here, and it’s as close to a no-brainer as you get.