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Welcome to the world of Machi Koro, in which the tax office is as irritating as the real one.
This game places you in charge of a city which you grow into the biggest and best in the region, with the winner being the first ‘Mayor’ to build four landmarks: a Train Station, Shopping Mall, Amusement Park and Radio Tower, because in this charming fantasy world people still listen to FM.
However you only start as a little village with a sole Wheat Field and a Bakery. Clever selection of cards and the luck of the dice will affect your gameplay. What’s interesting about this is how the base game is a simple gateway, but the Harbour expansion turns it into a longer game with much greater replay value in a perfect piece of add-on judgement.
How to Play Machi Koro
The rules are simple. Every city card has an activation number. Activation? Yep, because each player has three phases each turn: first roll a dice (or two if you’ve built the train station), second activate any cards in your city with that number at their top. Normally these will earn you income, such as rolling a one for a wheat field which gives you one coin.
You slowly grow your bank balance, and in phase three you buy cards from the ‘marketplace’, which is basically all the different types of cards in their own piles in the middle of the table. So, you start with rolling a one a few times, get a few coins from your wheat field, and you could buy a café.
As your city grows so does the chance to earn money from each dice roll, so you might have four wheat fields and get four coins from each one, or you might have a building that awards coins for types of other cards, or even allows you to take coins off another player. In the case of a rare few cards, they activate even when an opponent is rolling, and there are lots of special rules, dominated by the four landmark cards which you start with half built and activate when grown.
What’s the strategy? You decide whether to spread out to cover more dice rolls, or focus on a few. Do you want a group of cards that activate on a one and bring in a lot of cash, or do you want cards that bring in less money but cover one, two and four? Do you want to activate your train station and roll two dice, because you’ll need to have bought more expensive buildings which activate on nines and 10s, etc.
You can start to chain cards together, so a building draws on the presence of other buildings, and the landmarks have different values so can be built in any order, giving you have the classic go for the big one first or last dilemma.
Going Deep
Thanks to this streamlined system, bright art and good themes among buildings, basic Machi Koro is a fun, simple game that gets people into the hobby and fills a 30 minute gap. However, there isn’t much depth, and replay value falls off a quick cliff. Not every game has to be massive, and Machi Koro does what it aims for brilliantly.
But that’s not the end of it, because you can also buy a ‘Harbour’ expansion. This comes with more cards, more landmarks, the option for a fifth player and brilliantly, a revised set of rules you can use to vastly multiply the replay value.
In basic Machi Koro, you can build any of the buildings at any time as long as it’s your turn and you have the money, because they are all on display ready. But in the variant, a new system shuffles all the cards together, and only has a limited number available at once, drawn off the top of the deck in order. So, you can’t save up and buy your stadium, because someone else might take it first, and the shuffled deck might not produce another one for a while. Couple this with some tougher cards, and you have to think and adapt quickly.
It’s a simple change, but a massive one. Games take much longer, more thinking, more jockeying for position. It turns a simple gateway into a grand set of walls and it’s worth buying both at once to allow for this growth (and they all fit into the original game’s insert).
