Take a Walk With Me (Walking in Burano)

I'm always up for a new game and last night we got the chance to play on with our best gaming buds. Sharayah and I went over to Logan and Jenn's for a delicious supper and delightful chat. Actually, we had a small disagreement to work through, but we're all grown ups who an express our feelings and see things from others' points of view, so we dealt with that pretty quickly. After all the serious stuff was out of the way, we busted out some popcorn and a new game: Walking in Burano.

You can see my waterfront coming to life.

This comes from the same makers as Cat Lady (which I love) and shares some similarities, but I think it is more easily compared to Dream Home (which I like). If you boil it down, it's really just a slightly more complex version of Dream Home. In Walking in Burano, you have been tasked with designing and constructing a street of waterfront buildings. As you construct you need to pay attention to colour (buildings need to be all the same colour and you can't have two buildings of the same colour beside each other), cats, streetlights, flowers, plants, shops, people, chimneys, and a host of things that you score points for depending on which tourists or inhabitants visit your building. For example, if Santa Claus comes to your waterfront, you'll score points for every chimney you have across all of your buildings. Certain visitors give you points for all the plants you have vertically (in a building) or horizontally (across a few buildings). The police officer gives you points for non-adjacent street lamps. There are a whole bunch to pick and Logan and Jenn even had a mini expansion that came with more.

When I play with these three, I usually don't win, but I was on fire this game! With a little bit of luck, a few other people not getting the rules, and pouncing on some good visitors earlier, I came out ahead! I was the first to finish my waterfront.

You can see I had to cheat a little on the far right side there. You can break a colour rule by spending one of your starting 3VP pieces. Any that you have left at the end of the game count towards your final score. Adding this piece gave me an extra 6 points (thank you officer), so it was worth it.

Being the only one to finish all five buildings (and get all five visitors) was a big help. No one else was able to finish their fifth building on that final round so they couldn't get their max number of points. It's a little hard to tell here between the scribbles, but somehow Jenn had given herself an extra 20 points (she blames it on "miscounting"). Even with those bonus 20 points, I still would have had the leg up on her. You can see though that the other three were all very close in score - 61, 54, and 57. Sorry I'm gloating a bit, but I don't usually get to win on these game nights. 

Walking in Burano was good. I like the extra complexity and variety in how you score points compared to a game like Dream Home. I don't think it's different enough to warrant owning both games, but I won't turn someone down if they suggest we play this. Simple, but with lots of strategy and lots of cats!